Four years after moving his family’s football team out of San Diego, will Chargers owner and Chairman Dean Spanos respond to tough times by jettisoning his football leaders whose jobs were launched in San Diego?
The top of the football ladder underneath Dean Spanos and son John Spanos begins with General Manager Tom Telesco, who has final say on the team’s player personnel.
Telesco would seem secure for reasons listed below, but his win-loss record isn’t sparkling. The Chargers (2-5) haven’t won the four-team AFC West since the Spanoses hired him in January 2013 and are 55-64 overall for a .462 win rate in seven-plus seasons.
In his favor perhaps, Telesco has long worked alongside John Spanos, a Chargers employee since 1995 and a part-owner of the team. The two are similar in age. Both worked as full-time NFL scouts.
When Telesco came to San Diego, John Spanos’ stature within football operations rose. “Spanos,” per the team’s media guide, “has seen his role in the NFL draft grow exponentially since his ascension in 2013.”
Telesco has worked with several other Spanos family members, including an executive assistant. Coupled with his much-praised ability to build relationships — a skill former Colts head coach and colleague Jim Caldwell touted — Telesco may have attained honorary Spanos status in January 2019 when the Chargers took a 12-4 record into the postseason and won a first-round game at Baltimore.
At Chargers practices in San Diego between 2013 and June 2017, it was common for John Spanos and Telesco to watch together on the field.
In other turbulent times for the club, GMs who worked under Dean Spanos enjoyed job security that trumped that of the head coach. Spanos sided with GM Bobby Beathard over Bobby Ross and GM A.J. Smith over Marty Schottenheimer.
Also in Telesco’s favor is rookie quarterback Justin Herbert’s impressive start to his career. Drafted sixth overall, Herbert is the most important draft selection of the Telesco-Spanos era.
Soon after he drafted Herbert, though, Telesco noted the losing record that provided him the No. 6 draft slot. Then he linked his own job security to a potential trend. “We hope we don’t pick sixth very often,” Telesco told the Pat McAfee Show soon after selecting Herbert in April. “If we do, I won’t be making very many picks here.”
The Chargers (2-5) currently stand to get the No. 8 position for the 2021 draft. If they lose enough games to get a top-10 pick, it would mark the second time in the Super Bowl era the franchise had a top-10 pick in four of six drafts, matching a stretch between 1986-91.
Lynn, Bradley, Pep
Coach Anthony Lynn’s 28-27 record (.509) is superior to Telesco’s — but under Lynn the Chargers have dropped 14 of 17 games decided by one score or fewer since 2019. Can Lynn regain his touch of 2018, when the team won close games at Seattle, Kansas City and Baltimore?
Other besieged head coaches under Dean Spanos held the job after the coach fired underlings. Lynn sacked offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt midway though the slog to 5-11 last season. Gus Bradley, the defensive coordinator, received a three-year contract extension in 2019 but lately has seen his unit squander leads of at least 16 points in four consecutive games.
The Spanoses interviewed Bradley for the head coach job in 2013, generating favorable reports. Ultimately, Dean Spanos hired Broncos aide Mike McCoy for that post, but Bradley was added to Lynn’s first staff.
Herbert’s success has come under first-year quarterbacks coach Pep Hamilton, whom Lynn hired after the XFL folded in April. Hamilton was a head coach for the XFL’s D.C. club.
Lynn has many strengths and the schedule will serve up winnable games — but his predecessor McCoy was fired after not being able to halt a similar year-plus trend of blowing leads and losing close games.
By Tom Krasovic LA Times –
tom.krasovic@sduniontribune.com
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