The Chargers Run out of Juice, and the Largest Week 1 Upsets Ever

It was not a good week to be a fan of Los Angeles football.

If you’re a Rams fan, you watched your team do the galaxy-brained play of deciding that jet lag simply does not exist, flying in hours before their Melbourne game against the 49ers, and being fairly decisively beaten.  After also losing Myles Garrett to injury, the pre-season Super Bowl favorites have fallen to +650 in the betting odds – and all the way to eighth in DVOA’s Super Bowl odds.  The Superteam found its Vegemite in Australia.

But hey, that was an international game against a tough division rival.  Weird things happen when you add 16-hour flights to your pregame routines.  And sometimes, good teams beat other good teams!  I called the 49ers the NFC West’s mini-bosses in the lead up to the season, and I lost so many quarters to Goro back in the day.  I’m not overly concerned about the Rams in the long run, though the schadenfreude of seeing a loss from a team so presumed to be successful they got a Week 1 spot on 60 Minutes of all things is off the scale, like a Brian Flores defense blitz chart.

And the Rams surely had a better week than the Chargers, who got slapped upside the face by, of all teams, the Arizona freaking Cardinals.

I had been beating the drum all offseason that the Cardinals were better than you thought they were – not good, by any stretch of the imagination, but a 3.5-win over/under line was insulting for the talent they had on the roster.  And I was concerned that the Chargers might not mesh right away.  “[Mike] McDaniel is asking Herbert to play quarterback differently than he has before…And when you’re changing someone’s footwork and rhythm and asking them to reconsider how they view the game, it makes total sense that there might be some rough patches along the way.”  But I didn’t expect this.

The Cardinals’ 26-14 win over the Chargers wasn’t in a fluke, in the sense that there wasn’t just a handful of non-predictive plays that led to the Arizona upset. If they were to play again next week, I’d pick the Chargers again, but they were legitimately outplayed on Sunday.   The interior line was a major problem – Trey Pipkins, rotating in at left guard with Kayode Awosika, was a sieve.  Jake Slaughter looked like a rookie making his first NFL start, and the next successful pass block Cole Strange makes at right guard will be his first of 2026.  Ladd McConkey looked great, but when got hurt, the Chargers had no answer in the passing game.  Qunetin Johnston, Tre Harris and Derius Davis does not an offense make.  The coverage was rough, too – Jacoby Brissett is not an embarrassment as a starter, and you’re going to give up a big play or three to Trey McBride, sure, but when Kendrick Bourne is catching all eight targets for 75 yards, you’ve got serious questions to answer.

After one week, the Chargers rank 27th in defensive DVOA, including 51.7% against the pass – that’s quite bad, for those new at DVOA reading.  They were a more acceptable 17th on offense, but there’s a big split between when McConkey was on the field and when he left, and it’s far from ideal for the Chargers offense to be so focused around one guy – someone who may not play this week, either.   The Cardinals are sitting at 12th overall and sixth on offense.  One week sample sizes are small and squishy, but both of those numbers I would describe as shocking.  Followed quickly by “unsustainable”, but shocking leads the way.  And, well, maybe we were just wrong about these teams!  That does happen, from time to time.

The Chargers closed as 9.5-point favorites over the Cardinals.  That ties this for the 22nd biggest opening-week upset in NFL history, with most of the larger ones coming in comparative prehistory.

That got me to thinking.  It’s just Week 1, right?  Week 1 often can be misleading, especially in more modern times – with less practice and less participation in preseason, sometimes a team can look quite different in Week 18 than they do the start the season.  And fluky things happen.  But losing outright as a huge favorite seems….not good!  Is that an ill-harbinger for the favored team?  Do the underdogs end up over-achieving the rest of the way?  Typically, no – most of the time, a good team being upset early is just that, a good team being upset, rather than a sign of the sky falling.  But that doesn’t mean that cracks we spot early aren’t real.

Since the 2002 realignment, 16 teams have lost Week 1 games when they were favored by at least a touchdown.  Those 16 teams went on to win an average of 8.7 games the rest of the way – only just over .500.  The 16 teams that pulled off the upsets finished with an average of 7.7 wins, so the oddsmakers were picking better teams, broadly speaking – it’s just that the gap wasn’t as big as they suspected.

The Chargers can hold on to some hope that the teams with the truly large gaps tended to be alright in the long run. It’s hard to be considered a 14-point favorite over anybody and then go on to a losing season; that would be a misjudge of epic proportions.  But there are some very bad teams that sat there as significant Week 1 favorites who nevertheless ended up falling flat on their face – notably the 2002 Cowboys (5-11), 2011 Browns (4-12) and 2014 Bears (5-11).  I would guess that the Chargers aren’t going to be anywhere near as bad as those teams, but then, they would have guessed the same thing at the time.  And while some massive Week 1 underdogs went on to double-digit win seasons, there’s always a chance that this is it for Arizona.    The 2020 Jaguars shocked the Colts in Week 1, and then lost their next 15 games in a row.  It’s a long season.

But raw stats and averages are one thing.  Let’s look back at the five biggest Week 1 upsets since the 2002 realignment, and see if they ended up meaning anything the rest of the way.