Dave Caban shares his baseline 2024 projection for the Los Angeles Chargers while also considering the impacts of increases/decreases to market shares and team play volume.
Every offseason, I undertake the process of creating projections for every team. In previous years, this involved developing a projection that I believed would represent the average performance of all relevant players if a given season were played out thousands of times. This year, I have added steps to better understand how a player’s fantasy scoring could increase or decrease if changes in his market shares or his team’s play volumes were considered. Although my projections will inevitably have some large variances from actuals, this process will allow us to better understand a player’s potential upside and downside. (Quarterbacks were not included in this process as more nuance would be required and this exercise felt like one more suitable for the other positions. If time allows, I will home in on something similar for passers.)
Quick Programming Note: Moving forward in this series, I’ll be streamlining my analysis by condensing comments on baseline predictions, market share changes, and team play volume changes into a single notes section. I’ll focus on highlighting only the most critical insights. This approach will help me cover more teams, hopefully all, before some of your drafts at the end of August.
Team Level Considerations
My baseline projection positions the Chargers as an average team in overall play volume. Specifically, it places the team in the 80th percentile of passing and 38th percentile of rushing based on my 2024 projections set when this article was published. While there’s certainly a common narrative circulating that the team’s new head coach, Jim Harbaugh, will morph the team into a run-heavy offense that will look to run the ball at every opportunity, the reality is this team probably isn’t good enough to do so. Further, the team ranked in the bottom quarter of nearly every rushing statistic we track in the Advanced Team Stats Explorer. While Harbaugh has taken measures to improve the team, it’s unlikely to change things drastically, especially when one considers the team will largely rely on a perpetually injured J.K. Dobbins and a 29-year-old Gus Edwards. Last season, the team’s passing attack was better than its rushing attack but ranked poorly in yards per attempt, Points Earned Per Play, and Wins Above Replacement. The long and the short of it is that the team doesn’t project as one strong enough to pound the rock via the running game and will need to lean toward the pass to stay in games.
