Suggesting that the Chargers fire Mike McDaniel as the team heads into its bye week at 0–6 is very different than suggesting that McDaniel is not a good offensive coordinator. In the coming days and weeks, you’ll see these two ideas conflated—especially if the personnel change actually happens. McDaniel is an outlier personality who, instead of inspiring us all to be a little truer to ourselves, splits us into camps either defending his absolute genius or warring against the glasses-wearing nerd. It’s beyond tiresome.
In reality, I think that over the course of six weeks, we’ve discovered that McDaniel is almost certainly not the right coordinator for Justin Herbert. The anti-Herbert crowd will take the following as elite Herbert excuse making, which I understand. The pro-McDaniel crowd will demand mentioning that the Chargers’ offensive line was almost 100% a collection of mid-to-late-round rookies, with the unit absolutely in tatters once again in Sunday’s loss to the Chiefs.
But what shines through is not the fact that this unit is overmatched. It’s the strange timing of certain play calls. It’s the screen passes where half the offense is acting like it's another play call altogether. It’s the dance of backfield motion in which all of the players are slamming into each other like it’s still a dress rehearsal. And it’s Herbert himself, whose stare into nothingness as he cups the earholes on his helmet and listens for a play call, whose helmet slams into the bench, whose buildup of frustration whenever these issues are couched as a leadership problem, is indicative of someone who is simply not jibing with the person designing his offense and is trying not to scream it. That’s my interpretation, anyway.
To me, this illustrates the dividing line between quarterbacks who can thrive in a Shanahan-style offense and quarterbacks who would prefer more tools at their disposal to control the outcome of the play presnap. Shanahan offenses are more postsnap-leaning offenses, but Herbert has had success in his career with coordinators like Joe Lombardi, who spent nearly a decade as Drew Brees’s quarterbacks coach. At its core, this is more of a presnap offense that doesn’t ask the quarterback to react to the flow of a play, but instead have a good idea of where it’s going before the snap, based on coverage indications, and confirm that quickly after the snap before letting it rip.
Tom Brady is one of the more famous examples of this, notoriously coming to a head with former head coach Bruce Arians in Tampa Bay, and reshuffling the personnel in order to get Byron Leftwich as his offensive coordinator (and, really, an invitation to run the offense the way he wanted to run the offense).
Let me back up for a second and say this: While it feels wild to fire McDaniel after just six weeks of the season—after McDaniel was seen as one of the biggest hiring coups of the offseason—we have to consider team dynamics. The Chargers’ defense on Sunday played with fire. Over the past three weeks, Los Angeles is second in the NFL—SECOND—in EPA per play allowed. Down by 13 points late in the third quarter, the defense was still slamming itself into the Kenneth Walker III machine, stopping Kansas City on a goal-to-go situation when the game was already utterly hopeless.
And what followed was a zero-yard run, a delay of game penalty (which was really to avoid using a timeout because the Chargers were backed up against the one-inch line) and one of the more broken-looking pass concepts we saw in the NFL this week.
Again, McDaniel deserves the benefit of the doubt given the offensive line situation, but balancing the punchless nature of this offense with a defense that is keeping Los Angeles in games is untenable. People are talking about trading Herbert at the deadline—for fun, of course—instead of realizing that this team should be no worse than 2–4 right now with the way its defense is playing.
Now, here’s where I’m going to lose the rest of you, but I urge some patience. The other coach on this offensive staff who has experience play-calling is Adam Gase. Your memories of Gase likely date back to the finale of his Jets tenure. You may also link Gase’s tenure with Sam Darnold, and the journey that Darnold then set off on afterward as reason to believe that someone like Gase would be a disastrous mid-stream replacement for McDaniel based on those facts alone.
But—but!—Darnold is a perfect Shanahan-style postsnap player and came alive as a quarterback after spending time with Shanahan in San Francisco. His Super Bowl run came accompanied by Klint Kubiak, a Shanahan disciple, at offensive coordinator. And Kubiak was replaced by Brian Fleury, who was Shanahan’s tight ends coach. Darnold was not the right fit for Gase, whose star-rise as offensive coordinator came at the hip of Peyton Manning, one of the most infamous presnap players in the NFL. What if Herbert is simply closer in profile preference-wise—again, I am not calling Herbert Peyton Manning—to Manning and Brady and Rodgers (another quarterback who likes the offense his way and butted heads with Matt LaFleur and his twist on the Shanahan offense) than he is Darnold and Tua Tagovailoa and Brock Purdy?
Again, if a move is made, McDaniel will very likely return to San Francisco or one of the satellite Shanahan campuses around the NFL and perform admirably. He is wildly creative and within the galaxy of those offenses, remains an innovator. But this situation may be the defining example of why a great play-caller and a great quarterback cannot always coexist; why we see play-callers thrive in other offenses after inexplicable down years, just like quarterbacks take time to find the right offense.
None of us see anything quite alike. We all process things differently. Some of you will want to sit for a minute with your thoughts, then write me an email saying I’m a moron for thinking a Herbert-Gase pairing could work out better. Some of you would prefer to immediately head to social media and fire off a quick clown emoji. Both are correct, you just process the game differently.
In McDaniel’s case, his fatal flaw was assuming that this style of offense was universal and absolute, when in reality, the best thing for Herbert may be getting the McDaniel ideology out of this offense altogether, no matter who replaces him.
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