EL SEGUNDO — The Chargers acknowledged the obvious in the minutes and hours after their clunker of a loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday at SoFi Stadium. They didn’t play well offensively or defensively. They didn’t play up to their standards and they paid the price for it in the form of a 40-17 loss.
Here’s what we learned, what we heard and what comes next after the Chargers’ biggest loss of the season, a game in which their NFL-leading defense collapsed in spectacular fashion in the second half, a game in which they looked nothing like a potential AFC wild-card team:
BUMMER ENERGY
It wasn’t so much that the Chargers lost, according to defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, it was the way that they lost that was so troubling. Maybe it was the 30 consecutive points they gave up after taking an all-too-brief 17-10 lead in the second quarter. Maybe it was the 505 yards they gave up.
Something was amiss.
“Any time you don’t win, you’re mad and you’re frustrated, but the way that game went, there was a different vibe I haven’t felt with this group,” Minter said Monday. “This is where you need your leaders, the players, myself. We’ve got to be at our best. It’s a challenge. It’s an opportunity.
“I feel like we’ve done enough things together that we can look at each other. We can have hard conversations. We can have real conversations. We’re not going to sugarcoat anything. We’re not going to act like we did certain things good. We didn’t play the way we needed to play.”
Most alarming was the way the Chargers gave up big plays to the Buccaneers. Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield (288 passing yards, four touchdowns) threw touchdown passes of 57 and 35 yards to wide receiver Mike Evans (nine catches, 159 yards) in the third quarter, for example. Running back Bucky Irving had a 54-yard rush on his way to a 117-yard day, for another example.
It was the kind of game the Chargers had played in past seasons under the previous…
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