The Los Angeles Chargers defense has been off to a rough start this year. There were some marginal improvements in Weeks 3 and 4, but they were still not where they needed to be. The hope was that with the trade of JC Jackson over the bye week in Week 5, that there would be some improvement now that they didn’t have to deal with the distraction anymore – and thus they would have a more consistent lineup in the secondary. Against the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football, the results were mixed as the Chargers lost 20-17.
Chargers Defense Has Mixed Performance in Week 6
The Defensive Line
Let’s start with the positives – which mostly has to do with the defensive line. That side of the unit played very well. Dak Prescott had some degree of pressure in his face the majority of the night and was forced to go on the run a lot. He also got sacked five times – two of them coming from Morgan Fox, who has a total of five sacks this year himself. The line’s been doing well in general this year, even with Joey Bosa either being injured or not doing much (a topic for another time).
Arguably more impressively, they shut down the running game quite well. Tony Pollard, who has averaged 4.2 yards a carry this year, had 15 carries for just 30 yards. The Chargers simply were not allowing any room in the middle – and the Cowboys never really tried running outside, which is where the Chargers have struggled marginally more in run defense. (Evidently, someone didn’t do their scouting / film review job very well.) A good share of the credit here goes to Kenneth Murray, who was in on quite a few of those run stops.
The Secondary
For all the efforts of the defensive line, the secondary continued to struggle. Not as badly as earlier in the season, though; nobody was getting burned deep for 50-yard bombs. The only “big play” allowed on Monday night was a short pass to Pollard that involved a couple of missed tackles that allowed him to get a lot more yardage than he should have. In that regard, there was improvement – the Chargers took away the big plays.
The problem was, with the short-range game and the long-range game locked down fairly well, the intermediate game was not so well locked down – and this is how the Cowboys beat the Chargers in the end; chunk plays of 10 to 15 yards. There were gaps to be exploited there, and Dak Prescott found them (on the plays where he had time to throw, that is – or made time by scrambling). Notably, no one on the team could cover CeeDee Lamb – he had seven catches for 117 yards.
Status Quo?
The odd thing is, this felt a bit more like an average game for the Chargers defense in the Brandon Staley era – albeit with a tighter run defense. But with the big plays taken away, the intermediate plays were made instead – a pattern we have seen before. It’s something that Staley has never really gotten right all this time, and also something he hasn’t seemed to place as high priority on.
When compared to the Week 1 and Week 2 losses in particular, the failures of the Chargers defense seem a little less glaring here – because aside from that one Pollard reception that went wild, they weren’t giving up the big plays. The secondary wasn’t looking inept downfield. But the result was still the same because they were unable to lock down the intermediate passing game.
The defensive line can do their best and the secondary can wipe out the big plays, but against good or even decent opponents, this is the kind of result we can probably expect most of the time. Justin Herbert might be able to bail them out more often than not, but in the end, the Cowboys own defensive line proved too much for him on this particular occasion.
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