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The San Diego Chargers will lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars

If the San Diego Chargers lose in Jacksonville to the Jaguars on Sunday, these three reasons will be why it happens.

Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports

Offense

The last seven quarters of football for the San Diego Chargers have resulted in zero offensive touchdowns. The last time an offensive player made it into the end zone was Danny Woodhead on San Diego's first drive against the Chicago Bears.

If you think that's a special kind of suck that the Chargers haven't seen in a while, you'd be correct. Check this fun stat out:

Points Per Game:

  • 2003: 19.6
  • 2004: 27.9
  • 2005: 26.1
  • 2006: 30.8
  • 2007: 25.8
  • 2008: 27.4
  • 2009: 28.4
  • 2010: 27.6
  • 2011: 25.4
  • 2012: 21.9
  • 2013: 24.8
  • 2014: 21.8
  • 2015: 21.3
  • 2015 (post-Keenan Allen): 11.0

So, yeah..... this offense blows. Keenan Allen was probably the only thing really keeping it together, and it's gone to hell since he lacerated his kidney with too much awesomeness for one touchdown catch to contain.

Now, the Kansas City Chiefs' secondary is good. You could blame some of the team's rough performance last week on that. However, the Jacksonville defense is better than the Bears' defense that the Chargers struggled against and the Ravens' defense that they couldn't do much against after Allen's injury. Don't expect a flurry of points from Philip Rivers and/or Melvin Gordon on Sunday.

Defense

Go back and look at that list of points per game that's above one more time. It's pretty obvious that 25-ish points per game is "good", 27+ points per game is "really good" and 30+ points is "absurd"....right?

This season, the Chargers defense is allowed 28.2 points per game. That's worse than every team not named the New Orleans Saints.

To make things worse, the Chargers defense is also among the worst in the league at creating turnovers. To date, they've forced 9 turnovers (5 turnovers, 4 fumbles), or less than 1 per game. There are a couple of teams tied with that number (Ravens, 49ers), but only one team in the league is worse: The Dallas Cowboys, who have forced just 7 turnovers.

If you thought that, hey, maybe the Chargers can get their shit together on defense for this one game and beat the Jaguars, who haven't beaten many good teams this year.....well, no, you'd be wrong.

The Jaguars' weakness on offense, running the ball, shouldn't be much of a weakness against the 31st best rushing defense in the league.

Special Teams

Normally, this post is a list of three things that could work against the Chargers in their upcoming game. This week, I've decided to just break down the team into the three phases of the game because they're all going to work against the Chargers in this game.

Let's go over the ways in which the Chargers' return game is an abomination, shall we?

  • Through 10 games, the San Diego Chargers have ONE PUNT RETURN YARD. ONE! The next closest team? The Dallas Cowboys, who have 97 punt return yards and average 4.9 yards per punt return. Don't bother asking the head coach about this, though.
  • The punt return game isn't all "below-average", though. They're ranked 11th in the most fumbles during punt returns! So, not only are they not getting yards, they're actually turning the ball over while doing it.
  • The kick return game isn't much better. The Chargers rank 28th in yards per kickoff return, with 20.9.
  • The Chargers are one of the 12 teams in the league without a kickoff return of more than 40 yards this season.
  • Over the course of the season, on average, the Chargers start their drives on their own 20 yard line. Their opponents, on average, start their drives on their own 32 yard line.

Josh Lambo has been somewhere around "league average" or a little bit better this season, and Mike Scifres has been as inconsistent as we'e ever seen him, but neither of them have the power to overcome the rest of the garbage around them in the Special Teams department of the San Diego Chargers.