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San Diego Chargers Snap Counts: Week 12 vs. Kansas City Chiefs

A weekly feature looking at the distribution of playing time for the San Diego Chargers players on offense and defense. This week, we see who contributed to the upset win over the Chiefs.

By Andrew Tschiltsch

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Peter Aiken

Welcome back to the snap report, a weekly feature where we look at the Chargers players involved in each offensive and defensive snap and track how players earn and lose playing time as the year continues. I'm just going to get this out of the way early...

Wooooo! Ladarius Green earned a season-high 29 snaps against the Chiefs and scored his first career touchdown, a pivotal 60 yard romp through the Chiefs secondary. Here's to hoping that touchdown will be the first of many for Green in bolts.

Now let's look at the snap distribution for the rest of the offense. As always, these snap counts come from the NFL and the numbers are rounded to the nearest percent.:

As we can see, there wasn't much turnover in the offense from the loss against the Dolphins. One thing to consider when looking at this chart is the future of Le'Ron McClain in this offense. McClain has received just 18 snaps in the past four weeks combined, and has only hit the double digit mark in three games all season. After last season, John Gennaro explored whether the Chargers should keep or cut McClain for 2013. In the article, John mentions that McClain's three-year contract has a cap hit of over $3 million in 2013, and an even higher hit if he's on the team for the 2014 season. Combining this information with the lack of snaps, it looks like the Chargers could be getting ready to move on from McClain after this season.

Here are the snap counts for the defense:

Derek Cox has now been benched in three out of the past four games, as this coaching staff continues to scramble to fix the team's issues in the secondary. I think it's become pretty apparent that the Chargers will need to invest heavily in the secondary during the offseason, likely though both free agency and the draft.

Donald Butler was a rare bright spot for the defense last week, leading the team with seven tackles (including four stops). Additionally, Butler dropped back into coverage 34 times and only gave up 14 yards on three targets. In fact, Butler and Manti Te'o were the only positively influential players in pass coverage according to PFF, earning pass coverage ratings of 1.1 and 1.9, respectively.

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