The Los Angeles Chargers are snakebitten. How do we know this? Because they just lost to the Tennessee Titans in the most painstaking fashion.
When you’re the Los Angeles Chargers, you’re used to being up against it. Every home game is a road game and every road game is a road game. And there may not be a more snakebitten franchise in the NFL today. Besides playing in a soccer stadium before becoming the Los Angeles Rams’ redheaded stepbrother in Inglewood, just look at how they lost in Week 7.
The Chargers had a chance to score a game-winning rushing touchdown to sink the Tennessee Titans in Nashville. Down 23-20 with seconds left on the clock, running back Melvin Gordon would take the snap on second-and-goal from the Titans’ one-yard line. Then, it happened, and it was so unbelievably bad for the Chargers.
Gordon would fumble the ball thanks to a great heads-up play by Titans linebacker Wesley Woodyard. Titans defensive tackle Jurrell Casey would make a clear fumble recovery in the end zone to put the Chargers out of their misery. That was, until the officials got involved.
Gordon was initially thought to have scored the winning touchdown for the visiting Chargers. Because all scoring plays are reviewed, the officials took their sweet time to let the soccer-stadium Chargers die a slow, slow, painful death in the Music City.
Everybody but the zebras knew it was a Titans recovery, but they decided to let the Chargers slowly bleed to death in Nashville on semi-national television. It’s going to be a very tough night for the thousands of Chargers fans in the world. San Diegans may be ashamed of their former team, but come Monday, they’ll wake up and realize they’re in San Diego and they can go surfing in October.
The many hundreds of Angeleno Charger fans will commiserate with each other over social media, because it’s not like they congregate anywhere else in the world besides in their soccer stadium that they share with Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s LA Galaxy for at least the rest of the year.
Sunday was another game where Philip Rivers’ team let him down. If you had the Chargers straight up or against the spread, it was an absolutely brutal way to lose. Thankfully the referees let them die a terrible death along the banks of the Cumberland River on Sunday evening.