History Declares Chargers the Super Bowl Champions

Are the Chargers destined to win the Super Bowl? Photo Courtesy

I’m a fan of looking at sports trends and using that to make predictions about the upcoming season. You can look at the past few years or more, notice an interesting trend, then project the results of the upcoming season based on this trend (and much more). Whether it’s the Madden Curse or the “Super Bowl Loser Won’t Make the Playoffs” Curse (finally broken last year) or something similar, it’s interesting how this league that we all love has the strange habit of following seemingly random patterns, year after year.

This year, the Chargers hope to become the third team in as many years to win it all after a disappointingly brief playoff run the year before.

The pattern goes something like this:

1. Do REALLY good in the regular season. Finish #1 in the Conference.

2. With home field advantage locked up, CHOKE in the playoffs (OPTIONAL: the first game), lose, and go home for six months.

3. The following season, don’t be as good as you were the previous year. You don’t even have to win the division. But make the playoffs and fly a bit under the radar as the world heads into January.

4. Upset a lot of good teams on their home field, and win your Conference Championship Game.

5. Win the Super Bowl.

The past two Super Bowl Champions have followed this pattern to bring them to glory – but the trend goes back farther than that. Think John Elway far, Broncos fans (and it could go farther, I didn’t bother to go back further since history wasn’t as cool before then).

CASE 1 – The 1997 Denver Broncos

At the end of the 1996 NFL season, the Broncos were 13-3 and the #1 seed in the AFC. As John Elway’s career was waning to an end, it seemed that the Broncos were talented enough to make a run. In come the Jacksonville Jaguars, in their mere second year of existence as an NFL franchise (think Texans three years ago), who shock the city with a crushing loss at Mile High. The Broncos go home in what Elway would later call the worst loss in his career. Steps 1-2 complete.

The following year, the Broncos did well to start but struggled near the end of the regular season. They finished 11-5, lost the division to the Chiefs, and headed into January as a Wild Card playoff team. Step 3 complete.

After exacting a little revenge on the Jaguars, they moved into Kansas City, then Pittsburgh – both really good teams with Super Bowl aspirations (and better records), and sent both teams home. Step 4 complete.

As huge underdogs, the Broncos beat the Packers in Super Bowl XXXII and won their first franchise championship. 5-step process complete.

CASE 2 – 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers

I’ll be brief with these cases – the Steelers lost in the AFC Championship Game after finishing #1 in the AFC in 2004. They became the first team to win three road games in the playoffs to win the Super Bowl the following year, beating the Colts and our own Broncos on their home field in the process.

CASE 3 – 2006 Indianapolis Colts

The Colts lost to those Steelers in 2005 in their first game of the playoffs, and everyone (including myself) had pretty much written off Peyton Manning as forever struck with the “Can’t Win the Big One” curse. Surprising a lot of people, and mysteriously finding a defense out of nowhere, the Colts went on to win the Super Bowl last year and finished a pattern this year’s Chargers hope to follow.

CASE 4 – 2007 San Diego Chargers

The Chargers have completed steps 1 and 2 – but so have a lot of teams throughout the years, and many more failed to make the playoffs the next year than those listed above who went on to win it all. Even the front office seems to have that trend on their mind – in a post I wrote a few months back, the Chargers front office even admitted they wouldn’t mind losing a few more games this regular season if it meant the team would have a bigger killer attitude than heading into January as a 15-1 team.

The Chargers will have to survive a complete coaching overhaul to make some noise in February, but it’s not like it hasn’t been done before to some extent (see Case 4). Even if they don’t make as big a splash as last year’s regular season, it would be wise for fans of other teams not to count them out once January comes around.

I think the Chargers will be in it until the end, and sometimes I think it’s a simply a matter of who is healthiest between them, the Patriots and the Broncos when the NFL heads into the playoffs.

But even if they don’t win the AFC West, the Chargers have the same mentality the Steelers and Colts had the year before. The Broncos weren’t able to muster the same kind of attitude last year after they lost the AFC Championship Game, but when every interview you hear from a Chargers player is just oozing Super Bowl references, you know where their focus is. As low as I’ve been on them, and as overrated as I think they were last year, I can’t honestly brush them aside knowing that a tiny piece of history has their backs as well.