The San Diego Chargers have started the 2010 season "slow", a common characteristic of this team under Norv Turner that has improbably continued despite the schedule-makers best wishes.
I don't want to sound like a jerk, but the Seattle Seahawks did not win this game. The San Diego Chargers lost it. Blame the turnovers (5), the Special Teams (2 kickoff return TDs and at least one more long one) or the defense that seemed to go into a soft-zone towards the end of the 2nd quarter and yielded a pretty easy TD to John Carlson. The Seahawks are still a bad team, although better than they were last year, and the Chargers dominated them in every part of the game except Special Teams and general discipline.
So, time to stop looking back at the last 3 years. This is a team that gets rattled by a loud crowd when they're on the road. This is a team that may be the league's worst at covering punts and kickoffs. This is a team that will beat itself with poorly-timed timeouts, delay of game penalties and false starts. Oh, also, apparently Bradyn Dombrowski cannot stop speed rushers....so it's probably a good thing that Marcus McNeill will be arriving in 3 weeks (which should coincide nicely with the 11-game winning streak to end the season).
Also, I don't want to say that the refs were biased during this game, but they seemed to be especially harsh on the Delay of Game calls (including not stopping the clock while they discussed whether or not to give Philip Rivers an Intentional Grounding penalty on one of the game's final plays, which even Dan Fouts commented on by saying "What a huge mistake by the officials."). matthewverygood (who was at the game), texted me at the end of it to tell me he saw lots of missed holding penalties on the kickoff returns and missed Pass Interference calls on the last Chargers offensive drive. Maybe he's bias, maybe he's not, but pushing the Chargers back 5 yards because the refs forgot to stop the playclock just seems a little harsh to me.
Anyways, we can't do anything about it now. Let's get ready for the Arizona Cardinals next week and hope that they don't have some speedy returner to crush all of our dreams again.