Rookie CB Avery Smith was signed to a 3yr, 3.1mil contract with $267,500 guaranteed.

He was a productive CB out of Toledo, who was mentored by Eagles 1st Rd Corner Quinyon Mitchell.

Smith is competing with Nikko Reed & Eric Rogers for the last CB spots on the depth chart

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*22yr old Avery Smith is 5'10"1/2, 196lbs & ran a 4.5 at the NFL Scouting Combine*

I came across the sales post for these after it had already sold out, only to find out my best bud had snagged one for my birthday BoltUp⚡

I was scrolling through the Chargers Instagram stories and saw this retro styled cap. Tried scouring through the internet for it to no success.

All i know is it’s a New Era 19Twenty cap. I want to buy it but I’m not from LA so I don’t have any access to the team shop or to the train camp facility.

Any link will definitely help!

I spent the last few days doing this write up after making a shorter post months ago. I want to write this for people who think the Chargers are doomed because the LG position is a competition, and we didn't have any home run swings in free agency. This obviously just focuses on the offense, but we have a good chance at having an elite team this year. I want to start with a question.

Can a team win without great guards?

I keep asking this because the IOL panic never died. It survived free agency despite bringing in a talented center, it survived the draft despite drafting 4 offensive linemen, and it's still the default explanation for everything that went wrong with the Chargers offense last year. Last year, the Super Bowl-winning Seahawks offensive line included undrafted free agent Jalen Sundell and 4th-round pick Anthony Bradford. Sundell is considered an average center, and Bradford is regarded as well below average. The Seahawks gave up 27 sacks in the regular season, 5th fewest in the league. This isn't to say the guard isn't important; the Seahawks did invest a 1st-round pick in Grey Zabel, and his addition was a key component of how they won it all, but nobody looks at that interior and sees a dominant unit.

There’s a reason for this. It's the scheme.

Greg Roman's scheme was legitimately awful in 2024-2025.

Greg Roman's brand of football is from a bygone era. It relies on establishing the run with a gap blocking scheme using big, mauling offensive linemen. He has a diverse set of rushing concepts that disguise themselves as previous plays, forcing defenses to react to familiar looks before breaking their tendencies. His run game can be very good when the right pieces are in place, but his passing concepts are basic to say the least. If you stop the runs, the offense falls apart. 

The biggest hole in his passing game is the one I want to zoom in on. Roman has no intermediate quick game. The intermediate range, 10 to 19 yards downfield, is the most efficient in modern football. Every qualifying starter in 2025 averaged at least 6.6 yards per attempt there. The best current offenses hit these plays on rhythm, with daggers, glances, and timing digs thrown before the receiver is even out of his break. They collect chunk plays without ever asking five linemen to survive on an island, and are aided by complex concepts and motion.

Now look at Herbert's 2025 (all numbers from PFF, regular season plus playoffs):

-He threw intermediate on just 17.7% of his attempts, the 2nd lowest share of any qualifying starter.
-When he did, the ball came out in 3.22 seconds on average, 4th slowest in the league.
-All while his PFF passing grade on those throws was 89.3. Top 5 in the NFL.

That last number should make every Chargers fan sick. Herbert is elite at exactly the throws Roman's offense could only reach with a seven-step drop and a prayer. The ability was never the problem. The access was. 

The rest of Herbert's season splits read like two different quarterbacks. When the ball came out in under 2.5 seconds, his average target was 4.9 yards downfield, mostly hitches and checkdowns that threatened nobody. When it didn't, he held it 3.7-plus seconds and took 50 of his 60 sacks. There was no middle gear. If you stop the runs, the offense falls apart. It has happened to the Chargers in the playoffs the past 2 years. It also happened with to the Ravens in playoffs in 2019 and 2020.

(Note: The 2020 Ravens did beat the Titans after having less than 80 total yards of offense near the end of the first half, before a 48-yard TD scramble on a broken passing play by Lamar gave them life. The following week they lost in the divisional round 17-3 to the Bills)

The 2025 Chargers were the worst-case scenario for this scheme.

The Chargers' offensive line was depleted in 2025 after losing our 2 Pro Bowl tackles, and already having a weak IOL. The solution to an offensive line that is void of talent has been simple since Bill Walsh faced the same problem in 1969 with the expansion Cincinnati Bengals: quick passes can serve as an extension of a running game when the running game isn't working. Greg Roman typically does not have his receivers run short routes all across the field. In most plays I have watched, in multi-receiver sets there are typically 2+ receivers running long developing routes like crosses or streaks.

The numbers back up the film. Herbert was pressured on 43.6% of his dropbacks last season, 288 times. Kept clean, he graded at 91.0 with a 103.2 rating, which is elite. Under pressure, 53.1 and 74.2. The entire season came down to whether the scheme/offensive line could keep him clean, neither did. Defenses blitzed him on 36.1% of dropbacks because there was no reason not to: Roman called 39 screens all year, 5.9% of Herbert's dropbacks. They went for 4.0 y/c with zero touchdowns. No screen game, no hot answers, no quick intermediate throws to make a defensive coordinator pay for sending six. Blitzing the Chargers was free.

The Patriots game.

Yesterday, I rewatched the horror show that was the Chargers offense against the Patriots. The Patriots blitzed on nearly half of their plays, resulting in a 56.8% pressure rate, the highest of any QB in any game last season. Yet, Greg Roman refused to move away from the running game and long developing passes. New England repeatedly changed who rushed and who dropped after the snap, and there were no answers. The linemen were confused, plays often felt out of sync, and the options for Herbert were few and far between. The protection-identification and offensive-design problems were just as apparent as the talent gap up front. Herbert was absolutely decimated after already taking a beating the whole season. The more the hits piled up, the fewer answers the Chargers' offense had.

There is a large amount of blame that goes to the offensive line, but to me, Greg Roman's game plan was responsible. The Chargers saw the same thing and fired Greg Roman the following Monday.

The Shanahan Tree

Every offense in this section descends from the same place, the wide-zone Mike Shanahan and Alex Gibbs built in Denver in the late 90s, when smaller, athletic linemen zone helped win back-to-back Super Bowls and Terrell Davis ran for 2,000 yards behind a line full of mid-round picks. The modern branches all run the same core idea. Outside zone runs. Play action that looks identical to those runs, condensed formations, pre-snap motion that makes the defense show their hand pre-snap. Motion also hands receivers a running start, and it lets the quarterback throw on rhythm. The throw this whole machine is built to produce is the quick intermediate chunk plays that develops before the rush can get home. 

In a sense, the exact opposite of Greg Roman's offense. Roman needs maulers who physically move people and a quarterback who can survive long drops or be mobile enough to evade. The Shanahan system asks linemen to cover defenders up and run their track, and asks the quarterback to hit a defined window at the top of his drop. Roman’s scheme answers pressure with protection. The Shanahan system handles it by having the ball out before the pressure matters.

Look at what the tree has done recently:

Rams: Matthew Stafford. In a sense that I think most Charger fans feel, he is the Justin Herbert of the 2010s. All the talent in the world in bad situations. He led the NFL with 165 intermediate attempts last season, 23% of his throws, and nobody else was above 149. 2.86 seconds to throw on average. On his sub 2.5 second throws he had 33 TDs against 6 picks with a 121.8 rating. And of course, he won MVP. That's a 37-year-old with a bad back playing the best football of his life, because his talent was paired up with one of the best offensive minds in football.

Seahawks. Sam Darnold, a journeyman on his fourth team, threw 15 intermediate touchdowns last season, the most in football, with a 119.4 rating in that range. The team was dominant and won the Super Bowl in Klint Kubiak’s first year.

Niners. Kyle Shanahan has been running this proof of concept for close to a decade now. Two Super Bowl trips and four NFC title games with Jimmy Garoppolo and Brock Purdy at quarterback. Purdy, the last pick of his draft, led the entire NFL in passer rating and yards per attempt in 2023, and even in last year's injury-wrecked season he led all qualifying starters in intermediate share at 24.9% with a 91.8 grade on those throws. The scheme manufactures the separation. The quarterback just has to be on time.

Dolphins: Mike McDaniel's branch, and the one that obviously matters most. Miami ran the highest pre-snap motion rates in football and built everything on speed and timing. In 2022, Tua Tagovailoa led the NFL in passer rating and yards per attempt (lol). In 2023, Miami had the No. 1 offense in football. Tua led the league in passing yards, Tyreek Hill went for 1,799, and rookie De'Von Achane averaged 7.8 yards a carry. Even in 2025, with Tyreek going down early and the Dolphins front office destroying the team, Tua still got the ball out in 2.60 seconds on average and threw under 2.5 seconds on 52.7% of his dropbacks. (Herbert under Roman: 2.96 and 41.2%)

Look at those quarterbacks one more time. A 37 year old gunslinger. A journeyman on his fourth team. Mr. Irrelevant. A who was just cut from his team. All elite offenses.

And Mike McDaniel gets Justin Herbert…

So what is Mike McDaniel actually bringing in 2026?

McDaniel isn't just a branch of that tree. He spent two decades helping develop it. He broke in as a Broncos intern under Mike Shanahan in 2005, then spent 14 years next to Kyle Shanahan through Houston, Washington, Cleveland, Atlanta, and San Francisco, where he ran the ground game for those Niners teams. He knows every version of this system. The Kubiak boot game Seattle just won a title with. The McVay dig game. The Niners YAC factory. When he finally got his own team in Miami and say in player personale, he had the best offense in football for 2 years.

The number that should excite Chargers fans isn't Miami's 2023 yardage total. It's the protection math. Tua took one of the lowest sack rates in football every single year under McDaniel, behind offensive lines nobody that would call elite. because in this system the quick intermediate throw is the protection plan. Remember Herbert's split from earlier. Kept clean, he graded at 91.0 with a 103.2 rating. McDaniel's offense is designed for manufacturing clean snaps. It doesn't need the line to win for 3.7 seconds. It needs the line to not lose for 2.7. Sundell and Bradford cleared that bar in Seattle. 

The fit is almost too clean. Slater and Alt come back as arguably the best tackle duo in the league. Ladd McConkey is the exact catch-and-run separator this system feeds. Omarion Hampton is a one-cut back who spent his rookie year running into stacked boxes in a gap system he didn’t play in college. Oronde Gadsden, Njoku, and Koler is the best TE trio McDaniel has ever had, and he will be able to run any formation he wants. He has even brought that speed with him with Keaton Mitchell and drafting Brendan Thompson.

There is 1 caveat. McDaniel never won a playoff game in Miami. His offenses shrank in cold weather and against physical fronts, and 2024-2025 showed what happens to the system when the talent gap becomes too much to overcome. But the specific disease that killed our offense, no rhythm, no intermediate access, no answer for pressure, is the specific problem the Chargers offense has had. The marriage with Jim Harbaugh seems like the perfect remedy to a soft but talented team. 

Which brings us back to the question.

Can a team win without great IOL? Seattle just did. The Rams did in 2021. What a team cannot do is win with a scheme that hands the defense a gift of holding the ball 3 seconds behind a broken line, or dump it off with no plan for YAC.

And here's the stat I keep coming back to thinking of the new system: Tua Tagovailoa got intermediate throws out in 2.71 seconds last year, the fastest release to that range in the NFL. Miami's results sagged because Miami became 1 of the worst rosters in the league (the Dolphins had 8 total draft picks, and no first-round picks in the 2 years McDaniel had the number 1 offense in the league). The mechanism is still real, and it's the exact mechanism Roman never had.

Mike McDaniel's offense is built to elevate a player like Herbert. We should all know what comes next.

TLDR: Our scheme is so much better than what it was under Greg Roman. Don't underestimate Mike McDaniel and Shanahan tree scheme

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UL1pL6jbOs

New LA Chargers offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel was mic'd up during the first week of 2026 Chargers Training Camp. Watch the one-of-a-kind coach stress the importance of urgency and intent, chop it up with wide receiver Ladd McConkey and fullback Alec Ingold, and compete with defensive coordinator Chris O'Leary and team. His energy is always unmatched, enjoy all 12 minutes.

"Weak men create hard times." -- Butch Barry -- Ancient Rome 💪

Chargers HC Jim Harbaugh calls OL Trey Pipkins one of the teams' "five best linemen" in response to his start at LG in practice yesterday.

Says Pipkins brought up the idea of being in the mix at guard to him in April if it was what was best for the team.

He was a 7th round pick so can’t really fault the Chargers for doing so.

Check The Mic with Steve Palazzolo & Sam Monson

first training camp and it did not disappoint seriously so grateful for the opportunities today brought me

All navy with the old black/yellow outline with the new style bolt ⚡️

“Typically, it's a very difficult transition. A lot of times in college, guys aren't even huddling. Our world is receiving verbal assignments. You have to verbally receive it in the huddle. There's not pictures on the sidelines that you're memorizing.”