Meet the NFL’s luckiest owners:
Dean and John Spanos.
Four years after they stumbled into Justin Herbert, a top-10 quarterback with whom they nevertheless have won no playoff games and posted a .456 winning percentage, the fortunate Chargers leaders appear to have a real shot at lucking into coach Jim Harbaugh or some other winner who’s led a franchise to the Super Bowl.
But, the Chargers being the Chargers, there’s a catch.
The Spanoses will have to get over themselves in order to hire someone as credentialed as Harbaugh. They’ll need to loosen their tight grips on money and power. He’s not another rookie head coach, like the past three hires. And he’s pushier and far more expensive than Norv Turner.
But, good gravy, the football gods are smiling on Dean and John as they search for a head coach.
One, their franchise QB serves as a great recruiting tool. No other NFL team in need of a head coach boasts a quarterback as capable as Herbert, 25.
Two, thanks to their recent team losing 12 of 17 games despite being maxed out on the salary cap, the Spanoses hold the fifth slot in this year’s draft. And because of Herbert, they can plow all of their draft capital into other positions.
Three, the football gods have flooded the market with big-time head coaches, in addition to intriguing coordinators such as Raheem Morris, Aaron Glenn, Eric Bieniemy and Ben Johnson.
How’s this for a who’s who of available head coaches: Harbaugh, Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, Mike Vrabel and Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, who took the Falcons to a Super Bowl.
Of those five, only Vrabel hasn’t led a team to a Super Bowl. Yet in the four-decade Spanos Era of family ownership, Vrabel’s accomplishments as an NFL head coach far exceed those of any Chargers hire other than Marty Schottenheimer.
Harbaugh heads the class.
His reported availability means the Spanoses have a shot at a proven if quirky leader who sports a .720 win rate across 13 college seasons and a .695 win rate in four NFL seasons; who took the 2012 San Francisco 49ers to a Super Bowl; who transformed Brady Hoke’s beaten-down Michigan program into one that reached the past three national playoffs and now boasts the school’s first undisputed national title since 1948.
Just two months ago it seemed less likely that Harbaugh would want to return to the NFL. The Michigan job pays well. It affords the head coach great latitude in filling out a roster.
But now, it wouldn’t be surprising if Harbaugh leaves his alma mater, which is still under NCAA investigation for recruiting violations, in order to the Chargers, Raiders, Commanders or another NFL club.
Not only did Harbaugh recently hire NFL insider Don Yee as his agent, he guided Michigan past Alabama and Washington in the national playoffs, enabling him to leave on the highest possible note if he so desires.
Providing another exclamation point to Harbaugh’s record, the Ravens rode an NFL-best defense into the playoffs this month as the AFC’s top seed. Coordinating that unit is Mike Macdonald, who served as Harbaugh’s coordinator in 2021.
Twelve years younger than Carroll and 11 years Belichick’s junior, Harbaugh, 60, excels at building sound, physical teams that win at a high rate.
Herbert, who’ll turn 26 in March, appears no less capable than Alex Smith and Colin Kaepernick, who each took Harbaugh’s 49ers to an NFC title game, the latter advancing to a Super Bowl.
Paying top dollar for Harbaugh would enable the Spanoses or their media proxies to brag about the family’s decision to move the Chargers to Los Angeles in pursuit of higher revenues.
Hiring Harbaugh would make the Chargers relevant in Los Angeles, where TV ratings for the club’s game telecasts on CBS this past year once again fell short of their ratings on KFMB Channel 8 in San Diego. Their TV ratings would jump in San Diego, where ratings have fallen from 60 to 70 percent and where the Bears-Packers game was shown last week instead of the Chargers-Chiefs game.
But again, there’s a catch.
Dean and John Spanos would have to change their ways.
Former NFL football executive Randy Mueller spent 11 years working for the Chargers after serving as general manager of the Dolphins, Seahawks and Saints.
Mueller speaks highly of Harbaugh, but has expressed some skepticism about the Spanoses being a great fit for the hard-charging coach.
“He would be good for the Chargers. I don’t know that the Chargers realize how good he would be for them,” Mueller said last week on “The Athletic Football Show.”
“They’ve never really been willing to commit to the power of a personality like Jim’s. They’ve hired people with lesser cachet — people that really didn’t know as much as them. It’s kind of been a hiring practice that I’ve thought they had for years. And I think, frankly, it hurts the franchise when you’re afraid to step out like this and hire people that have perspective and experience, and then actually trust them.”
Paying up for a coach who can command top dollar isn’t what the Spanoses have done. Their most distinguished hire by far, Schottenheimer, was still owed money by Washington when that club’s since-deposed owner, Daniel Snyder, fired him after just one season. The trend of not hiring the pricier coaches goes back to family patriarch Alex Spanos firing the coach he inherited, Don Coryell, and replacing him with assistant coach Al Saunders.
But hiring a coach like Harbaugh, said Mueller, “takes a financial commitment, driving the Brinks truck up and dumping it on the yard.”
And, making it critical that the Spanos also hire the right GM — one who can deftly manage both the Spanoses above him and the coach below or adjacent to him — it often means meshing with a coach who’s going to push very hard to get what he wants.
Exposing themselves to such challenging folks isn’t how the Spanoses have typically operated, noted Mueller, who was the 2000 NFL Executive of the Year with the Saints.
“You could really say the biggest personalities they’ve had were Bobby Ross and Marty Schottenheimer, and both ended badly,” he said. “Marty was 14-2 and they fired him. They can talk about all the consequences and all the issues Marty had with the GM (A.J. Smith) there — but, Dean Spanos signed off on it.”
I see Quinn as more capable than most Spanos hires and less challenging to the Spanos Way than Harbaugh.
But with Carroll stepping down this week, Quinn, 53, may now be a candidate to return to Seattle, where his NFL-best defense led the franchise to its only Super Bowl victory.
Tremendous good luck and perhaps also L.A. money have given the Spanoses a big opportunity here.
Will they take advantage?
