Coming to Ruin an AFC Championship Near You

Sorry, America. Apologies for the Chargers scuttling the AFC Championship game matchup you all wanted to see. In doing so, the Chargers displayed the heart, fortitude, savvy and smarts that were all found lacking by this very blog just a few months ago, overcoming a hostile crowd, injuries to their offensive stars and some absolutely brutal officiating to achieve perhaps the most improbable victory in franchise history.

Some thoughts:
- We hate to say it because it makes us look like ungracious winners but… Roger Goddell dodged a bullet yesterday. Had the Colts won, the league office would’ve spent the entirety of this week attempting to explain away some of the calls that were made against the Chargers, namely, the holding call on Eric Weddle that negated Antonio Cromartie’s (Cro!) interception return for a touchdown at the end of the half and the pass interference call in the 4th quarter on Clinton Hart. It also appeared that Merriman and Phillips were held about every time they got to the corner on their pass rushes. After being largely immune to the same, Goddell would’ve found out what David Stern, the NBA commish has had to deal with for years now: the open secret that the Association will do whatever it can to put big market teams (especially the L.A. Lakers) in the Finals.

- It was encouraging to see some emotion from Norv Turner. Though we don’t subscribe to the theory that a coach needs to be overly demonstrative on the sidelines to be effective, we feel that every once in a while a coach needs to let the refs know, in no uncertain terms, his opinion of the officiating if for nothing else to let the players know the coach has their back. We would’ve loved to have been in the Charger locker room at halftime… we imagine the Chargers are on the hook for some damaged lockers and furniture. They channeled that emotion effectively, though in the 2nd half – something that they had been incapable of doing prior to yesterday.

- The CBS acronym of Can’t Broadcast Sports was upheld in fine fashion yesterday. We never seemed to get replays in a timely fashion and because of sloppy camera work, we never saw the alleged offsides penalty against the Chargers in the 3rd quarter that kept a Colt’s drive alive and which ultimately resulted in a touchdown. And with Joe Theismann now out of the picture, Dan Dierdorf assumes the position…. of worst game analyst in football. Words cannot describe how much we detest this man. To add insult to injury, it seemed like the team of Greg Gumbel and the ‘Dorf were assigned to about half the Charger games this year.

- Billy Freaking Volek!

- The Charger’s defense successfully executed what the Jaguars defense tried the night before against the Patriots. The scheme was to sit back in the cover-2 zone, keep everything in front of the secondary, make the offense chip its way down field and…. pray for turnovers! If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know we are not fans of the cover-2, a defense of which the Chargers are ill-suited to play, but Ted Cottrell can successfully argue that the scheme helped produce a victory. We fully expect the Chargers to do the same thing next week, whereby Tom Brady will carve up the Chargers secondary like a Thanksgiving butterball.

- The Chargers may need to look for a placekicker in the off-season. Nate Kaeding continues to miss playoff field goals.

- Though he didn’t have the impact we were predicting because Antonio Gates did start, the one time Legedu Naanee got his hands on the ball, he acquitted himself quite nicely, rambling 27 yards on a tight end bubble screen during the Billy Volek-led game-winning scoring drive.

- In our minds, one of the most important plays of the game was Mike Scifres, with his back to the goal line, uncorking a 66 yard punt and forcing the Colts to start their last offensive series at their own 32 yard line. Aside from the obvious field position advantage gained, it’s simultaneously a psychological boost to the defense and a deflation to the Colt offense. Mike Scifres is the best punter in the game. End of discussion.

- And finally… are we going to eat some crow and admit we were wrong about Norv Turner? Nope. While we congratulate Turner and the rest of the coaching staff for taking the Bolts to the conference championship game, they could’ve saved everybody, including themselves a whole lot of grief by capitalizing on this team’s core competencies from Week 1. These Chargers are a big, physical team that is equipped to get after the quarterback on defense and run the ball to set up play-action downfield on offense. This current 8 game winning streak is not merely coincidental with the coaches playing to those strengths.

Great win. The Chargers open up as 14-1/2 pt. dogs to the Pats. Good. Let’s stay loose, go into New England, roll the bones and see what happens.

... and as Darren Spoles would say. "buh-bye".