The Chargers’ offensive line mess has become more than a short-term problem. It is now a real indictment of how this front office has tried to build the roster.
Los Angeles is off to its worst start since 2017, when it opened 0-4, and the issues have piled up fast: injuries, mistakes, procedural penalties, ball security and stretches where the team has looked completely out of sync. But the biggest concern was already there before the season started. The interior of the offensive line was a known weak spot, and instead of getting better, it has turned into one of the defining reasons the Chargers are stumbling.
Justin Herbert has been under siege. He has been pressured, hit and sacked at historically bad rates, and that reality has put a harsh spotlight on a problem that has followed this organization for years.
This is not just about one bad season. It is about a long-running failure to solve the middle of the line.
To be fair, that failure did not begin with this regime. Philip Rivers lived through versions of the same problem, and his ability to manage the offense helped cover up a lot of the damage. The lack of investment in the offensive line was already baked into the organization before Jim Harbaugh and Joe Hortiz arrived.
Still, the bigger question now is how this issue has gotten worse in the third year of Harbaugh and Hortiz. That puts the spotlight on the philosophy Hortiz brought with him from Baltimore, where he spent his entire rise in the Ravens organization after entering the NFL as a personnel assistant in 1998.
He worked under Ozzie Newsome and later Eric DeCosta, with a background built heavily around college scouting. He became a scout in 2001 and later served as director of college scouting from 2009 through the 2018 season.
That Ravens pipeline matters here because the Chargers’ approach to the interior line looks a lot like Baltimore’s. For much of the 2010s, the Ravens had a steady force in Marshall Yanda at right guard, but left guard was unstable after Ben Grubbs left in free agency following the 2011 season. More recently, Baltimore has faced the same kind of criticism the Chargers are hearing now under DeCosta: capable starters leaving, cheap replacements filling the gaps, and the hope that scheme and quarterback play can paper over the rest.
That formula is familiar in Los Angeles. It shows up in the way Hortiz has handled the Chargers’ line, where interior offensive linemen are being treated like replaceable pieces rather than positions worth paying up for.
In 2024, Hortiz’s first year running the Chargers’ front office, the team went cheap with Bradley Bozeman at center and tried moving Trey Pipkins from tackle to guard. In 2025, the club took another modest swing by signing Mekhi Becton in free agency.
But the structure of that deal made it clear it was a one-year gamble, and the Chargers did not back it up with meaningful draft investment. Their lone late-day-three pick, Branson Taylor, did not make the 53-man roster in 2025.
This year’s choices only sharpened the criticism. The Chargers let Zion Johnson walk in free agency rather than bringing back a capable starter, then filled the room with a series of low-cost guard options while banking on Tyler Biadasz and the new scheme to lift the group.
That same kind of bet has shown up before in Baltimore, including the Ravens’ 2017 approach when they leaned on Marshall Yanda to anchor everything. Once the veteran got hurt, the whole unit started to crack.
There are really two obvious ways out of this cycle: pay for proven starters, or draft linemen who can step in quickly, no later than the third round. The Chargers have only partially moved in that direction.
They drafted Jake Slaughter in the second round, but making a center-to-guard conversion was always going to carry risk. Cole Strange at right guard was another attempt to find a usable starter on the cheap, but his background made him a gamble too.
The broader plan seems pretty clear. The Chargers are trying to find replacement-level guards at a discount and trust that the rest of the line will cover for them.
That can work until it doesn’t. As 2025 has shown, it can unravel quickly if one player goes down and turn disastrous if two do.
That is exactly where the Chargers are now. When Tyler Biadasz went down for the season in training camp, the one player they were counting on to steady the unit disappeared. Suddenly the guards had to hold up on their own, and they were lined up next to a rookie center.
Former NFL scout John Middlekauff recently weighed in on the Chargers’ interior line on Colin Cowherd’s podcast and said he had heard from someone in NFL personnel that the group looked like “practice squad rejects.” That kind of evaluation is brutal, but it fits the tape and the results.
The Chargers chose to chase cheap answers at guard and hope scheme, tackles and Biadasz would make everything work. Right now, that bet looks like the wrong one. And if they want to break this cycle, they may finally have to do the thing they have kept avoiding: pay for unquestioned capable starters.
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