The Chargers offense ranks 20th, and quarterback Justin Herbert has three touchdowns and four interceptions and his passer rating of 73.4 ranks 26th. Los Angeles has more turnovers (six) than touchdowns (five) as a team.
Coach Jim Harbaugh said he has not considered taking control from offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel.
“No, we trust Mike. We believe in Mike,” Harbaugh said, via Austin Knoblauch of the Los Angeles Times.
It’s not like Harbaugh has any other option but to publicly give McDaniel a vote of confidence and hope the former Dolphins head coach can fix it.
Harbaugh hired McDaniel this offseason to add a dynamic element to the offense, which hasn’t happened yet.
While Harbaugh issued his first public criticism of Herbert, saying Monday that Herbert needs “to be better” in his decision-making, the head coach hasn’t done the same with McDaniel.
“We’re searching for every possible way to give ourselves an advantage,” Harbaugh said. “Every possible way to not beat ourselves.”
In his postgame comments, Herbert pushed back against the idea that McDaniel’s scheme is too complex.
“He’s definitely a guy that we need to lean on; he’s done such an incredible job,” Herbert said, via Jonah Bronstein of the Associated Press. “It’s on us as an offense to run the plays the way he sees them, listen to coaching, and do our job to make those plays. And we haven’t done that for him. So obviously, we feel horrible.”
The Vikings have scrapped the J.J. McCarthy experience after the 2024 first-round pick made only 10 starts in two-plus seasons.
That adds McCarthy to a short list of first-round quarterbacks who, for whatever reason, didn’t last very long with the teams that drafted them.
Via Kevin Seifert of ESPN, Elias Sports Bureau identifies only four first-round quarterbacks in the past 25 years who started 10 or fewer games for the team that picked them.
Paxton Lynch, the 2016 first-round pick of the Broncos, started only four games in Denver. He never played in a regular-season game for any other team.
Trey Lance, for whom the 49ers traded up in 2021 to make the third overall selection, started only four games in San Francisco. (He has since made eight appearances with two starts for the Cowboys and Chargers.)
Johnny Manziel, a first-round pick of the Browns in 2014, started eight games in Cleveland. He never played for another NFL team.
McCarthy had exactly 10 starts with the Vikings. He won six of them. But the Vikings have opted to take a fifth-round pick in order to move on from him.
While it’s far less than the first-round pick plus more that they gave up to get him, it’s more than what they would have gotten if he’d been cut before the start of the 2026 season. Which seemed to be a real possibility in late August, especially after he slipped to third on the depth chart.
Either way, the Vikings pulled the plug. And now they’ll have to hope that McCarthy doesn’t become the latest second-act (or third-act) quarterback who becomes a star for someone else.
Sure, the Vikings would never say it out loud. They don’t need to. They know that the only thing that will make their McCarthy misadventures worse will be watching him become for someone else what the Vikings hoped he would be.
The coach who not long ago said Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert will be remembered as the best quarterback in NFL history wants him to be better.
Via Kris Rhim on ESPN, Jim Harbaugh offered a public critique of Herbert’s decision-making to date in 2026.
“Be better,” Harbaugh told reporters. “Be better. And that drives Justin, that drives me, that drives his position coach, that drives Mike [McDaniel], the [offensive] coordinator. I mean, drives us all.”
With three losses in three games, Harbaugh’s not wrong.
“We want to be better,” Harbaugh said. “We got to be better. We got to look at our scheme. We got to look at how we’re performing, how we’re doing things and who’s doing it.”
In Sunday’s loss to the Bills, which included a blown 10-0 lead, Herbert completed 20 of 34 passes for 226 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. His passer rating for the season is a career-low (by far) 73.4. (Herbert’s full-season low point in passer rating is 93.2.)
Here’s a theory about the current issues in L.A. With all the talk about the Oscar Madison/Felix Unger vibe between Harbaugh and McDaniel, there has been little scrutiny of the relationship between Herbert and McDaniel.
McDaniel is verbose and quirky. Herbert is quiet and no-nonsense. It’s entirely possible that the personalities don’t mesh, and that this has kept them from working together the way they could.
As the Chargers stare at a possible 0-6 start (they play the Seahawks, Broncos, and Chiefs before a Week 7 bye), the situation bears watching. Something’s off for the Chargers’ offense, and the biggest difference is that the Chargers fired offensive coordinator Greg Roman and replaced him with McDaniel.
If you looked at the box score for Sunday’s game in Buffalo without checking the score first, you’d likely pick the Chargers as the team that wound up winning.
They had about the same number of yards on offense as the Bills, who committed five turnovers while being penalized 10 times for 88 yards. The Bills still wound up winning 24-16, however, and the Chargers are now 0-3 after entering the season as a popular choice to advance to the postseason.
After the game, several Chargers sent a message of keeping the faith and wide receiver Ladd McConkey underlined it with a pointed remark to those whose belief in the team has been shaken.
“If you’re not on board and you don’t think this can get turned around, then get out of here,” McConkey said, via the team’s website. “I feel like we got people to do it, we got all we need. We just have to go execute.”
That sounds like an easy enough solution, but actually watching the Chargers illustrates just how hard it is for the team to actually do it.
Josh Allen is a quarterback. When it comes to his nose for the end zone, he’s been performing like an elite running back.
Allen has scored two rushing touchdowns in each of Buffalo’s first three games of the 2026 season. No quarterback has ever done that.
Only three running backs in NFL history have ever done it.
Jim Brown did it in 1958. Stephen Davis did it in 1999. And Priest Holmes did it in 2003.
While Allen also had his first two turnovers of the year, he did enough to help the Bills dig out of a 10-0 hole (fueled by three total Bills turnovers in the first half) and move to 3-0, while sending the Chargers to 0-3.
