Some people are fans of the San Diego Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Diego Chargers. This 2015 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.


Your team: The San Diego Chargers. YOU’VE BEEN THUNDERSTRUCK…


Your 2014 record: 9-7, but livened up with the occasional Jewish joke or two. OH THOSE JEWS.

Your coach: Mike McCoy. Listen, Mike McCoy is boring as shit and looks like a golf pro. I’m not here to talk about Mike McCoy. I’m here to talk about strength coach Rick Lyle…

That is the most strength coach-looking strength coach of all strength coaches. Rick Lyle will fucking burn a hole through your quads just with his eyes. I’m staring at his photo right now and I can literally hear a voice screaming at me YOU GOT TWO MORE IN YOU! YOU GOT TWO FUCKING MORE IN YOU! I’m not ready for a man of his intensity. Rick Lyle will fuck you up. Approach him at bar and he will grind a Schnapps bottle into your eye sockets.


[Ed note: Rick Lyle’s stare isn’t nearly as bad as his smile. And his stare is terrifying.]

Your quarterback: Philip “Quiverfull” Rivers. MMMM… PEPPERMINT ROLL!


This could very well be Marmalard’s swan song for the Chargers. He’s in the last year of his contract and doesn’t want to play in Los Angeles, presumably because Los Angeles is an unholy dungeon of secular Hollywood wickedness. In the Rivers household, you watch VeggieTales, or you watch nothing at all. Now everyone gather ‘round the hearth for a good ol’ hymnal!


I’ll miss him. I’ll miss the way he poorly hides a torn kidney every season. I’ll miss the fact that he does his best, on an annual basis, to have his interception total match his number of children. I’ll miss the way he could beat the Colts and literally NO OTHER GOOD TEAM. It’s gonna be quite a legacy he leaves behind when he finally goes to the Texans.

What’s new that sucks: Antonio Gates got suspended! He invariably misses the first four games of every season with a foot injury anyway, so this is a nice change of pace for him and us.


Also: you’re moving! Pack your bags, Chargers fans, because your shitass team is heading up the Interstate to share a stadium with your most hated rivals! They even brought in noted shitbag Carmen Policy to oversee the whole thing. I know that sounds horrible, but just wait until you see the designs! [Correction: these are the designs for a proposed San Diego stadium, the one the NFL said will never ever happen.]


Is that Budweiser AND Toyota signage? Be still my heart! It’s like I’ve died and gone to signage heaven! Of all the stadium amenities out there, branded signage is the one that means the most to me.

And are there terraces? YOU BEST YOUR FUCKING ASS THERE ARE TERRACES.


Why are there always terraced walkways in the future? Even in Guardians of the Galaxy, they were like, “This future spaceworld needs MORE terraces!” Human progress means having the ability to walk just one level above or below other walkers.

But that’s not all, DUDES. The new Chaiders stadium will also have stock-photo skateboarders!


Big air, bro! As a football fan, there’s nothing that excites me more than having a skateboarder potentially run into me.


And how much will this lavish new space-mesh field cost? Just $1.7 billion! Why, you’d be a fool NOT to buy it! The city of San Diego, so very eager to fuck itself over for the NFL’s sake, countered with a $1.1 billion dollar stadium plan of their own that the NFL essentially wiped its ass with. “Pfft. Only $1.1 billion? Go fuck yourselves.” Even Boltman couldn’t get the plan to go through. Boltman sad...


This is the same situation that is playing out in St. Louis and Oakland, of course. The NFL is using LA to concoct an imaginary timeframe (“NOW”) to pressure city leaders, and city leaders are calling them on their bluff, and then the NFL just makes a new timeline a few months later, hoping it does the trick this time. Join us in 2027, when the Chargers are STILL threatening to move while going 8-8 from the Qualcomm parking lot.



What has always sucked: San Diego is lovely and beautiful and more people would live there if not for the people who currently live there. This city is a giant douche-bro enclave, where fuckboys still pop their collars in the gaslamp district without any irony. “OOOH LOOK! IT’S A WHITE HOUSE | BLACK MARKET!” Everyone who grows up in San Diego flees as soon as they can, as if they grew up in Missouri. It makes no sense. How can our nicest city be so utterly intolerable? Someone really dropped the ball here. All those pristine beaches and yet the biggest tourist attraction is a stupid zoo.


On the field, this is the same underachieving Chargers team you’ve known and barely-paid-attention-to for a while now. Rivers will toss some picks. Keenan Allen will steal your fantasy money (for real, fuck that guy). New running back Melvin Gordon will go way too high in your auction draft. They will be a perfectly average, replacement-level NFL team for the duration of the season and for the rest of your life. Every year the Chargers (that reminds me, my phone battery just went down to 20 percent!) are just good enough to make the playoffs, but not good enough to win anything of substance. They devalue the eventfulness of big games when they reach them. They’re what the Giants should be. Their most fascinating player is the one who committed suicide three years ago.

What might not suck: Gordon is a fucking beast and new lineman Orlando Franklin might actually help keep Marmalard alive for a little bit. I smell a divisional playoff loss!


Hear it from Chargers fans!

Charlie:

Only the Chargers would draft Ryan goddamn Matthews in the first round and as soon as he has left the team after giving them 25 healthy carries turn around and trade up AGAIN for first round running back. Watching Melvin Gordon break his collarbone two games into the season running into the Gatorade cooler is inevitable. At the end of the year Rivers will take his 25 kids and disdain for pre-marital fucking to some godly city and the Chargers will go back to losing 12 games a year.


Rob:

Five centers started for us last year. Fucking five.

Meridith:

My son, who was 9 at the time, wanted to go to an NFL game. The only football gear he had was a 49ers t-shirt. With that on, off we went to the shithole known as the “Q”. The game was a Thursday night game, so the fans had the better part of the day to drink and act stupid. There was a group of young 20-something girls a couple of rows in front of us. At some point, they spotted us and took exception to my boy’s shirt. From that point on, every time the Chargers did something good (which fortunately wasn’t often which is par for the course), they would turn around and flip off my 9 year old child. We left at halftime.


Alex:

Last year, after having about a roughly 1% chance of making the playoffs at some point in the season, the Chargers made a comeback that coincided with all of the right teams losing in the last week (note: this miraculous situation included the Jets beating the Dolphins in the last week). With all of the pieces set in motion, all the Chargers had to do was beat the Chase Daniel-led Chiefs. They lost.


Darrel:

The Chargers might be having the worst offseason in NFL history. This team can’t even get to OTA’s without completely shitting the bed, to wit: 1. The Franchise QB is so over the team he doesn’t even want a contract extension. 2. The team publicly pissed off the captain of their Defense by not offering him an extension and giving a huge contract to Corey Liuget at the same time. 3. They play in the second-most dilapidated stadium in the NFL, and are so desperate for new digs they’re willing to move in with the RAIDERS to a stadium in Carson. Carson is like Vinci without the opulence. 4. Their other star offensive player just got hit with a 4-game PED suspension. I’ve been a fan of this team my whole life (I’m your age). This team got blown out of one Super Bowl, and hasn’t even really smelled one since. The best player they ever had is best remembered for riding an exercise bike. This team has played almost 50 NFL seasons without winning a single title. That is hard to do. The ownership is so bad at PR that almost two-thirds of the city would rather they leave than spend ANY public money to keep them, me included. And why would anyone want to keep them? They’ve squandered LT’s entire career, and now Marmalard’s entire career, with just a handful of playoff wins. We live in the best city to play football in (especially in winter), but haven’t hosted a Super Bowl in well over a decade, and will never host one again. The team’s greatest moments all end with shocking, incredible shit-the-bed moments of unbelievable stupidity. The best this team ever was in 2006, they lost because Marlon McCree wouldn’t take a goddamn knee after intercepting the ball. The list of playoff choking goes on forever: Nate Kaeding’s incredible ineptitude in the playoffs, Vincent Jackson kicking the flag. This team snatches defeat from the jaws of victory on a regular basis. So, the 2015 Chargers are looking at their last season with Rivers, Weddle, and Gates. It could be their last season in San Diego, and they could be lame ducks as soon as December, when the NFL votes to see who gets to move. When I take the long view, and try to figure out if the Chargers have brought me more joy or anguish, I know the answer is anguish. I know that I’ll be better off if they leave, (because like most San Diegans, I cannot root for any LA team). That’s how much the Chargers suck, my fandom feels more like a prison, and I look at their moving to LA as a reprieve.


William:

San Diego is Cindy Brady. Cute and fucking worthless. Do you know who our most famous Chargers fan is? Nick Cannon.

Nick:

So the owner gives the City two choices: 1. Screw your city over by building a stadium that you can’t afford in a place where you don’t want it, or 2. We’ll screw the city over by leaving for a place San Diego despises and move in with their biggest rival. And I am supposed to continue supporting them? That’s fucked up.

Michael:

Chris Berman’s love of the powder blues almost makes me hate the powder blues.

Jared:

For almost a decade now, the Chargers front office has effectively stuck to one strategy: Letting stars and top draft picks walk in free agency. Off the top of my head, here’s a non-exhaustive list: Drew Brees LaDanian Tomlinson Michael Turner Darren Sproles Ryan Mathews Vincent Jackson Luis Vasquez (to a division rival) Quentin Jammer (to a division rival) Antoine Cason If you suited these guys up on the same team today, they would beat the current Chargers. This season’s only hope for success hinges on the fact that our only two remaining star players—Rivers and Weddle—are both auditioning for new teams next year. We won’t resign Weddle because we spent our budget locking up Donald Butler and Corey Liuget, two men who combined for less tackles than Weddle last year. Can’t wait to share a stadium with the Raiders.

Scott:

The team actively despises its fans - they bought land in LA, posted a job that requires the flexibility to move to LA, and employing a lying, blowhard mouthpiece whose hobbies likely include stealing candy from kids when he’s not talking shit about the mayor.


Keven:

The Chargers mascot made an appeal to the city council to keep the team in San Diego and all I could think about is that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa gets gum stuck in her hair and while the whole town is giving advice to Marge on how to get it out, the Capital City goofball comes in and dances and honks his horn. That’s how I assume that appeal went. They’ll move, we’ll pretend we care for a few seasons.

Brett:

This organization ALWAYS gives me someone to hate.

Jay:

Qualcomm Stadium is at this point, a toilet, and is literally falling apart. You walk around looking up to make sure you don’t walk under an area that’s dripping some type of fluid out of the cracks in the concrete. So where does this team end up? Who gives a shit. My HDTV signal is excellent.

Jesse:

The price of housing is unreal, and there are exactly ZERO good jobs. The so called “middle class” here is made up of personal trainers and hair dressers with a healthy dose of marines mixed in to round it out.


Mary:

I’m really looking forward to soon sharing a home with Al’s eternal flame, which shall cast us into a perpetual Dutch oven of darkness.


Omar:

I invited my cousins, who are super Charger fans, to my high school football game. My high school has probably a top-3 football stadium in California, so it’s pretty good. And when they went to the football game with me, they were amazed by our stadium, they acted like it was the fucking Superdome.


Stephen:

Fuck the 2009 New York Jets.

William:

Our quarterback is an Old-Testament-thumping evangelical Promisekeeper. Amazingly enough he doesn’t even lower the average IQ when he’s in town. The horrible truth is we deserve Philip Rivers because we’re all like that. San Diego is crawling with people like him. We all drive white pickups and try to convince you that Switchfoot isn’t just a Christian rock band. The whole COUNTY is Evanescence and ‘Calvin peeing’ stickers all the way down. It’s Atlanta with sand. It’s clear to me now that we live in a universe in which the Chargers are predetermined at the quantum level to never win a championship. They will be crushed, as we all will, under the unfeeling heel of geological time, and they will do it without a single Super Bowl title to their name. The Earth will die. The sun will burn out. We will all be long dead and ruling our own celestial planets because we’ll have been baptized into the Mormon church by our shitty great-grandchildren. The universe will collapse. It will all begin again. The Chargers will still suck.


Bennett:

Whenever attending a game you have a 95% chance of sitting next to a bald guy 12 BL Limes in from Chula Vista wearing Dickies shorts to his ankles with white knee high socks, Converse shoes and a Merriman jersey.


Ben:

Mike McCoy looks like he’s just there until he has enough cash to buy the bitchin’ cabin and boat he’s planning to retire to. He doesn’t believe in anything resembling analytics and pretty much answers every press conference question with a lame platitude like “We are doing whatever we think is best to win the football game.” or “We do what we do and we are not going to change.” Plus, even though we fired our quack team doctor, we’re consistently one of the worst teams when it comes to injuries. At this point, there won’t be enough of a team left to move to Los Angeles like the owners are hell bent on doing. The last year of being the San Diego Chargers is going to end with our second stringers losing five games because everyone else is either broken or stumping for Santorum.


Sull:

I went to bed crying on at least three separate occasions growing up because of the Chargers losing playoff games. Fuck Nate Kaeding’s right foot with a ten-foot long spool of barbed wire covered in Icy Hot.


Submissions for the 2015 NFL previews are now closed. Next up: The Miami Dolphins.