COSTA MESA, Calif. — The Chargers (8-6) head to Indianapolis to take on the Colts (4-9-1) on Monday night at Lucas Oil Stadium.
The Chargers have won two straight and three of their last four. The Colts have lost four straight and are 1-4 since Jeff Saturday replaced Frank Reich as head coach in Week 10.
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The Chargers are favored by 4.5 points on the road, according to betting odds from BetMGM.
This time last year, the Chargers traveled to Houston to take on a 3-11 Texans team. They had a 73 percent chance of making the playoffs entering the game, according to ESPN. The Chargers had 11 players on the COVID-19/reserve list. The Texans had 21. The Chargers lost, 41-29, and went on to miss the playoffs in Brandon Staley’s first season as head coach.
That game was on Dec. 26. This game is on Dec. 26. The Chargers were 8-6 heading into that game. They are 8-6 now. They were going on the road to face a floundering team out of the playoffs. The similarities between the two situations are uncanny.
The Chargers are hoping for a very different result in 2022.
This is the Friday Notebook — on a Christmas Eve Saturday.
Injury report
The Chargers only have one player on their game status report heading into this game. Reserve defensive back Kemon Hall, who has played 33 snaps on special teams over the past two weeks, has been ruled out with a hamstring injury.
All other injured players, including safety Derwin James Jr. (quad), cornerback Bryce Callahan (core muscle) and defensive lineman Sebastian Joseph-Day (knee/back), practiced fully Saturday and came off the report. James is set to play in his first game since Week 13. He has been dealing with a strained quad.
For the Colts, cornerback Kenny Moore II (ankle) and tight end Kylen Granson (ankle) have been ruled out. Running back Jonathan Taylor (ankle) was placed on injured reserve this week. All-Pro linebacker Shaquille Leonard has been on IR since November.
Inside defense’s players-only meetings
Heading into a Week 13 game at the Raiders, the Chargers defense was making history — the bad kind of history.
The Chargers were allowing 5.44 yards per carry on the ground. Not only was that the worst rushing average in the league for 2022, but it was also the highest yards-per-carry average any defense had allowed in a season since 2000, according to TruMedia.
Edge rusher Kyle Van Noy came across that stat, and it did not sit well with the two-time Super Bowl winner. When the Chargers signed Van Noy in the offseason, Staley heralded his championship experience. What happened next was a manifestation and a realization of this experience.
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On the Thursday before the Raiders game, Van Noy called a players-only meeting after practice. The whole defense attended. And as the meeting began, according to Callahan, Van Noy wrote one number on the board and circled it: 5.44.
“He’s a leader, man,” Callahan said this week. “He’s trying to get sh– right. He’s a professional, grown-ass man trying to finish the season off right. He’s a big part of the run, so he doesn’t want that 5.4 on his name. Nobody does.”
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The focus, initially, was on improving the historically bad run defense.
The Chargers did not see results right away. They gave up 144 rushing yards on 26 carries — a 5.5 yards per carry average — to Josh Jacobs in the Raiders game. But Van Noy and the rest of the Chargers players stuck with the players-only meetings, coming together every Thursday afternoon after practice. This week, the meeting happened on Friday, as the Chargers’ practice schedule was shifted back a day with the Monday night game.
The meetings, according to players, have developed into something more than just run defense. The players will also go over third-down defense and assess specific plays they expect the opposing offense to run in certain key situations. And eventually, the results came — across the board.
The Chargers have played their best stretch of defense this season in the past two games. They dominated the Dolphins’ high-powered passing attack. They limited Derrick Henry to 62 rushing yards through the first three quarters of a win over the Titans. The defense has allowed just 28 points in the past two games, and seven of those came on Tyreek Hill’s fluky fumble return in the Dolphins game. The Chargers rank fourth in third-down defense since Week 14.
“I feel like it’s done a lot, just helping us, not having the coaches there all the time, when we can kind of just work on those problems amongst ourselves,” Callahan said. “Because we are out there on the field at the end of the day, so just seeing how other players see it and how we should play it, I feel like that does a lot. Maybe sometimes better than coaching meetings.”
“It’s personal accountability,” linebacker Drue Tranquill said. “It’s us saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re supposed to be doing, and, look, you’re not doing it.’ Because we all want the same thing. We all want to be great. We want to be the best run defense. So I just think the communication, the clarity, the expectation for one another, I think it’s great. And I think if you’ve seen anything the last two games, it’s swarm and strain. It’s been nothing more. Go watch the number of guys getting off blocks the last two weeks as opposed to other weeks, and then go watch the number of guys attacking the ball on the ball carrier as opposed to weeks prior. We’re getting two, three guys to the ball, and a big part of it is these meetings.”
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“We understand the message within each other, because we’re out there playing,” said James, who has missed the past two games with a quad strain but has attended the meetings and seen the effect on his teammates. “It’s different when the coach gives you the message. But when you go and hear it from your brother, and you see it how he sees it, that’s a different feeling.”
When asked about the players-only meetings this week in the locker room, Van Noy — who signed a one-year contract with the Chargers in May — brushed it off as just part of his role on the team.
“Something had to switch, right?” Van Noy said. “I wasn’t happy with what we were doing together, so just wanted to have something where we could all bring it together and learn from each other and get better.
“I’m just trying to help, you know? I’d like to finish my career here, and I’m happy here and just want to pass down my knowledge. Obviously, I’m on a one-year, and if this is the only year, I want to be able to leave my mark and hopefully pass down to the young guys of how to be a true professional and just kind of how I see the game and pass down knowledge that I’ve been taught.”
Both James and Tranquill said this was their first time having regular players-only meetings during their time with the Chargers. James was drafted in 2018. Tranquill was drafted in 2019.
After practice in the locker room, teammates can be heard yelling over to Van Noy’s locker to get the time for the meeting.
He answers, sometimes with a reminder to not be late.
Leadership is talked about a lot with NFL teams. This, specifically, is what it looks like.
“It’s huge,” Tranquill said. “Player-led teams are the best teams.”
Matchup notes
• The Chargers have gone nine straight weeks without scoring a third-quarter touchdown. It is the longest active streak in the NFL and tied for the fourth-longest such streak for any offense over the past five seasons, according to TruMedia. Asked about those issues this week, offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi said he and his staff need to put together a better, more defined play-call script coming out of halftime.
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“We definitely highlight, hey, here’s the plays based on what we’ve seen, here’s what we want to come out and highlight early,” Lombardi said. “But I’ll probably get more specific, like you do at the beginning of the game, and script them out a little more specifically as far as the order we’re calling them, and that will certainly help.”
• The Colts benched Matt Ryan this week and will start Nick Foles on Monday night. Foles has played just two snaps for the Colts this season, and he has only started one game since Nov. 16, 2020. That start came Dec. 26 of last year. Foles went 24-for-35 passing for 250 yards and a touchdown, leading the Bears to a 25-24 win at the Seahawks. Foles threw a game-winning touchdown pass to Jimmy Graham with 1:01 remaining in regulation. He is, of course, rather familiar with coming off the bench and finding success, winning the Super Bowl with the Eagles in 2017 after replacing an injured Carson Wentz.
“You know what he is capable of. You know what he has done in the league. You know what he has accomplished,” Staley said this week. “He has made a lot of winning plays and you have full respect for what he has accomplished in the league. The reason why he has been in the league so long is because he is a quality player. They obviously feel like he is a good enough player to be starting in this football game.”
• Former Chargers defensive coordinator Gus Bradley calls the defensive plays for the Colts, and he has his unit in Indianapolis playing well this season, despite losing Leonard. The Colts enter this game ranked 11th in defensive DVOA, Football Outsiders’ efficiency metric, and 13th in defensive expected points added per play, according to TruMedia. Bradley has stayed true to his system: lots of Cover 3 and minimal blitzing. The Colts use Cover 3 at the third-highest rate in the league, according to TruMedia. And they have the third-lowest blitz rate in the league, bringing five or more pass rushers on just 15.2 percent of opposing dropbacks, according to TruMedia. Justin Herbert faced this defense in his first NFL training camp in 2020, Bradley’s last year in Los Angeles. Herbert and Bradley developed a close relationship in their year together. Herbert also faced Bradley’s defense twice last season when Bradley was the Raiders’ defensive coordinator. Herbert in those two games: 59-for-102 passing for 605 yards, six touchdowns and one interception.
(Top photo of Sebastian Joseph-Day and Kyle Van Noy: Robert Hanashiro / USA Today)
