A.J. Smith's Chargers Did Everything but Win
A.J. Smith's Chargers Did Everything but Win
The late general manager, who died Sunday, built one of the NFL's greatest non-Super Bowl squads.
A.J. Smith’s tenure as general manager of the San Diego Chargers was seldom without controversy.
Take the 2004 draft, which came after Smith’s first full season as GM.1 It featured one of the most consequential top-pick trades in NFL history — with Smith gambling to select Eli Manning against warnings from the Manning family, then shipping him to the New York Giants for Philip Rivers and a handful of picks. That type of take-no-prisoners approach came to define the managerial style of the late former Chargers GM, who died of cancer on Sunday.
Smith was also in charge of the team in 2007, when owner Dean Spanos fired coach Marty Schottenheimer fresh off of a 14-2 season, and he picked the much-maligned Norv Turner as the replacement. Later on, Smith became infamous for unsentimentally dumping beloved veteran stars — even mocking them on the way out, as he did with legendary running back LaDainian Tomlinson.
In short, Smith ran the Chargers with a certain reputation, a reputation that may have ultimately helped lead to his downfall when the team stopped winning as much. But in retrospect, Smith also presided over the winningest decade in franchise history. And in fact, there’s a solid case to be made that he helped build the NFL’s best core that never appeared in a Super Bowl.
Let’s roll things back to the beginning, when Smith was San Diego’s assistant GM under his friend and mentor John Butler. In that role, Smith was present as the Chargers quickly rose from the ashes of the disastrous Ryan Leaf pick in 1998, helping to form a 2000s-era renaissance that shaped the franchise’s next decade — and beyond.
The team hit home runs by taking Tomlinson and Drew Brees with its first two picks of the 2001 draft, then hired the respected Schottenheimer as coach before the 2002 season. Smith kept accumulating talent after being promoted upon Butler’s passing, signing former Kent State basketball player Antonio Gates — who didn’t play any college football — as an undrafted free agent in 2003. (Gates would go on to become one of the greatest tight ends in NFL history.)
But the 2004 offseason was Smith’s masterpiece. He navigated the Manning drama, snagged the talented Rivers as a probable successor to Brees,2 got multiple picks in the process that would eventually turn into starters, and took several other future contributors lower in the draft. From there, the talented Chargers were off and running, building to a peak stretch of five AFC West titles in six years.
The primary element of San Diego’s success was a lethal offense that ranked no worse than fifth in scoring in any season from 2004 to 2011. Brees kicked off the first few years of that run as the team’s starting QB; then Rivers, Tomlinson and Gates formed one of the best “triplets” in NFL history during the half-decade to follow. Here’s a listing of the most productive QB/RB/receiver3 trios over a half-decade span since 1960, according to total Approximate Value (AV) across all three members:
San Diego’s defense, while not nearly as strong as the team’s offense throughout Smith’s tenure, wasn’t terrible either. With DT Jamal Williams, LBs Shaun Phillips, Shawne Merriman and Stephen Cooper, CB Quentin Jammer and DE Luis Castillo leading the way, the Chargers never had a season allowing more than the league-average points per game from 2004 to 2010.
The only thing missing for those Chargers was a deep playoff run. Whether falling to the Jets after a missed chip-shot FG, finding multiple ways to lose games they probably should have won against the Patriots, getting outclassed by the Steelers or losing to the Jets on missed FGs again, San Diego always seemed to underachieve badly in the postseason. That’s when they made it at all — the 2010 Chargers somehow found a way to miss the playoffs entirely, despite leading the league in total yards gained on offense and fewest yards allowed on defense, a feat that doesn’t actually seem possible:
At the time, I even coined a metric called the “Rivers Index” to measure the QBs who had the largest gap between actual wins and expected wins based on their stats. (Rivers ranked second-to-last in the regular season and last in the playoffs up to that point.)
Stats like these are why there’s a case to be made that Smith built the best team of the Super Bowl Era that never actually made a Super Bowl.
In the eight seasons from 2004 to 2011, San Diego won an average of 65.6% of its games in the regular season, with an average PPG differential of +7.3 and an average end-of-regular-season Elo rating of 1631. Only three (non-overlapping)4 eight-season spans since 1966 featured a team with a better winning percentage that didn’t make at least one Super Bowl:
1968-75 Oakland Raiders (76.3%)
1971-78 Los Angeles Rams (71.4%)
1990-97 Kansas City Chiefs (67.2%)
Only two teams in history had a better average PPG differential without making a Super Bowl:
1970-77 Los Angeles Rams (+8.6)
1968-75 Oakland Raiders (+8.1)
And only two teams in history had a better average regular-season Elo rating without making a Super Bowl:
1968-75 Oakland Raiders (1658)
1970-77 Los Angeles Rams (1633)
Considering the Raiders ended up finally making — and winning! — the Super Bowl the very season after that eight-year period ended (1976), and the Rams made — though lost ☹️ — the Super Bowl in 1979, while the Chargers are still waiting for their first Super Bowl appearance since 1994, it could be argued that the peak of the A.J. Smith era in San Diego represented the greatest collection of talent that failed to reach (or mostly even come close to reaching) football’s greatest stage.
How’s that for an epitaph? The brash, always-pugnacious GM might have had a few choice words about it. But in order to build the NFL’s biggest “what-if” squad of the Super Bowl era, you have to assemble a team with the potential to get there to begin with. And whether you loved him or hated him, there’s no question that Smith’s Chargers teams had that for the better part of a decade.
Filed under: NFL
Smith took over as San Diego’s general manager when former GM John Butler died of cancer in April 2003, two weeks before the draft.
Who was seen as lacking the physical skills of a top-notch QB. (File that under “things that didn’t matter”…)
Counting either a wide receiver or a tight end for the third slot, depending on who had the higher AV.
Meaning we discard repeat teams if their seasons overlap with a team that already ranks higher on the list.
Careers are often unfairly defined less by consistent excellence, and more by the perceived aberrant failure. We are captivated by the big, high profile, perceived mistake. Much like the Kramer painting in Seinfeld, it becomes something that the public just can't look away from or forget.
For A.J. Smith, that was his decision to allow Drew Brees to walk out of San Diego and into the arms of the Saints. A wholly a self-inflicted wound in the minds of many fans and observers. Yet, the NFL is nothing if not a series of very entertaining false mythologies teetering on a full-blown Mandela Effect. Drew Brees and A.J. Smith are no exceptions.
Brees was not some ugly duckling QB that Sean Payton later turned into a beautiful swan as the media likes to spin it. At the tender age of 25, he was already a Pro Bowl quarterback in San Diego with an Approximate Value in 2004 of 17 - one of his highest valuations in his career and in a season that kept Rivers firmly planted on the sideline. He followed that up with a very good year of 15 AV, the same as his first season in New Orleans.
In short, Brees was an excellent NFL quarterback before he learned how to spell Payton. Something that Charger fans remember well.
The other myth is that San Diego did not re-sign Brees solely because of his shoulder injury. In fact, they were negotiating an extension for him. Smith was quoted in early 2006 saying, "Drew Brees wants to be here, we want him to be here. Drew wants a long-term contract, we want him to have a long-term contract. We are working on that and continue to work on it."
Despite that, A.J. Smith had a healthy ego (a not uncommon characteristic for general managers) and wanted to prove he was right after all for having to trade Eli Manning to alleviate the resulting high-profile turmoil. Brees was also going to be more expensive soon, and Smith's well known frugality was another factor.
In the end, A.J. Smith was heavily invested in Rivers, but needed to play him to prove it. Brees soon looked elsewhere, and Smith moved on to Rivers. After a confusing and still unsettled series of events in Miami, New Orleans took the call and, well, the rest is history. Rivers it turned out was a very good NFL quarterback, but he was forever tied to Brees, and he just wasn't Drew Brees in the end. The Rivers Index is a terrific historical monument to the early days of "Chargers gonna Charger."
An often forgotten aside to the controversial 2004 QB swap (mentioned in the piece) was that the Chargers also got additional Draft capital in addition to Rivers that was used, in part, to acquire Shawne Merriman. A retrospective look at the Manning trade suggests that Smith did very well indeed, perhaps even better than that. But history is often not kind to messy details or secondary effects.
I always thought that Brees' later enormous success came to overshadow Rivers' excellent career as well as that of A.J. Smith, who was fired less than three years after the Saints captured the Super Bowl.