Brandon Staley was only part of the problem for Chargers

The Los Angeles Chargers were completely humiliated on Thursday night in a 63-21 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders. On Friday afternoon, the team fired head coach Brandon Staley. However, it only fixes a symptom of the Chargers' overall problem.

As bad of a job as Staley did, the Chargers follow the same script every season and always end up in the same place. The city has changed, the general managers have changed, the head coaches have changed and the starting quarterbacks have changed. The only constant has been the underwhelming results.

Every preseason the Chargers are hyped up as a team ready for a breakthrough and a top contender in the AFC. They consistently have had a franchise quarterback and a roster that is always built up as being something special. Then every year they finish within a game of .500 (either one game over or one game under) and either fail to make the playoffs entirely or fail to do anything when they get there. What follows this is a chorus of "the Chargers are too talented to be this bad" from the media that helped build them up. 

The unfortunate reality is that their record is an accurate reflection of what they are, have been and will likely continue to be. 

Since the start of the 2002 season the Chargers have had one of the most impressive runs of quarterbacks in the NFL, going from Drew Brees to Philip Rivers and currently Justin Herbert — each of them highly regarded and capable of putting up huge numbers. Typically when a team has quarterbacks like that, it is at minimum a constant playoff team and ideally a constant Super Bowl contender with at least one ring to show for it. 

But not the Chargers.

During that 22-year run of big-time quarterback play, the Chargers have made the playoffs just eight times, including only three times over the past 14 seasons. They have won only a total of five playoff games (one since 2010), played in just one AFC Championship Game and appeared in zero Super Bowls. 

When a team undergoes so many changes and keeps producing the same results you have to start looking for the constants. In almost all cases, that constant is the owner, in this case the Spanos family. Winning cultures start at the top, and it has to involve good decision-making. The Chargers consistently get these things wrong. None of the general managers since 2000 (John Butler, A.J. Smith and Tom Telesco) have done a good enough job building around their quarterbacks, and the revolving door of head coaches (Norv Turner, Mike McCoy, Anthony Lynn and Staley). 

The people in charge of making the big decisions keep getting them horribly wrong. There should be no confidence they will get the next big decision right. The names and faces will continue to change. The results will not.