EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - The Chargers didn’t make a deadline splash, and Joe Hortiz made it clear that wasn’t because he was asleep at the wheel.
The Los Angeles general manager said Thursday that he has been working the phones since Week 3, but he never saw a reason to strip the roster down after Tuesday’s trade deadline passed. Even with the Chargers sitting at 0-8, Hortiz said he viewed the group as one worth keeping together.
“There’s some players that you’re just not going to trade,” Hortiz said. “These players that have futures with us.
And a lot of those guys people didn’t call on, so it’s not to say that people called on them. Teams knew where I stood.”
He named several of those untouchables: quarterback Justin Herbert, wide receiver Ladd McConkey, tackle Joe Alt, safety Derwin James, and cornerback Tarheeb Still.
Hortiz’s comments came on a day when the Chargers were already dealing with the fallout from the Daiyan Henley situation. Bud Dupree, seeing reporters clustered near the locker room entrance, fired off his own message.
“Don’t ask hard questions to us; ask hard questions to them,” Dupree said, unprompted. “Ask the hard questions.
Everybody pull they cameras out and go upstairs and ask questions to them. Everybody.
Walk upstairs and ask them.”
Hortiz did not get into the specifics of the Henley situation, but he did push back on the idea that the Chargers had gone quiet around the league. He said the team had been engaged in trade talks for weeks.
“There’s a narrative … that some insiders put out there that we’re not picking up the phone,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone since Week 3.”
Still, the deadline ended with Los Angeles standing pat. While other struggling teams started tearing things down, Hortiz insisted the Chargers were not in that category. He said no major offer pushed him toward a deal, and that the few conversations he had did not amount to much.
“No one put together any packages that blew us away or that inspired us to continue,” Hortiz said, “and frankly, not a lot of calls on individual players. There were a couple.”
The Chargers’ record has put them in an awkward spot. They are not contending, but they are also not ready to surrender the season. Hortiz said the roster is still capable of winning games, and he pointed to the way the team has competed.
“I feel like we can win this year,” Hortiz said with a straight face. “I really do - I really do.
It just hasn’t gone our way. But you guys see them playing every week.
The fight, the effort, the attitude: It’s all there. We just got to get the breaks to go our way.”
He also made the case that one bad season should not erase what the organization has already built. The Chargers won 11 games in back-to-back seasons with many of the same players, and Hortiz said that matters when weighing whether to blow things up.
“The season has not gone the way we wanted. I’m not going to say we anticipated this, and we’re all pissed, we’re all frustrated, mad.
Whatever adjective you want to put on it, that’s how we feel right now,” Hortiz said. “But our job is to continue to fight this year but also have a team that we feel that we can go out there and be successful in the future, too.
And so, to sit here and say, ‘Oh, we’re having a bad year, we should get rid of everybody’? That just doesn’t seem like a smart way to build for the future.”
The Chargers did not move veterans on expiring deals, with Hortiz indicating that any talks would have depended on a real offer. Khalil Mack was the exception in the sense that conversations about players like him would have hinged on something substantial, and Hortiz said those kinds of calls were not there in volume.
For now, the Chargers remain stuck between two directions. They are not good enough to be comfortable, but not willing to act like the season is over. That leaves the rest of the year with competing goals: the front office trying to protect the future, the locker room trying to salvage the present, and everyone else wondering what exactly this team is playing for.
Jim Harbaugh’s answer was simple.
“Win the next game,” Harbaugh said. “Win this game and get on a roll. That’s our goal.”
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