San Diego Chargers Football Team

We're at the point where any San Diego Chargers victory can be summarized in two words. This goes back to Nov. 19, when between updates I saw a 24-7 San Diego deficit against Denver turn into a 35-27 Chargers victory and I text-messaged a friend to ask what happened. My buddy's reply: "LT happened." Flash-forward to Sunday, when the Chargers had to deal with a strong Oakland Raiders defensive effort, a shaky performance by quarterback Philip Rivers and a 14-7 Raiders lead in the fourth quarter.

Sure, he's among the NFL's elite quarterbacks, but San Diego's Philip Rivers in some ways is just another click in the crowd. He's one of the people who have clicked their way to more than 56,000 viewings of a highlight video of former Fresno State running back Ryan Mathews, the Chargers' first-round draft pick. It's clear that Rivers cannot wait for the season to begin. Of all the changes in San Diego this season — and there are many — the change at running back from LaDainian Tomlinson to Mathews will be the most scrutinized.

The picture has been there for the last five years, amid the ever-changing kindergarten art that adorns Kelly Kruse's refrigerator door. Kind of strange, really, as Kruse now admits, but the frozen moment from a postgame reception at the University of Notre Dame features Kelly and her sister Laura with their arms draped over the solid shoulders of football player Rodney Culver.

LT is leaving town. LaDainian Tomlinson, the All-Pro running back so famous he's known simply by his initials, was released by San Diego on Monday after nine seasons with the Chargers. He was due a bonus of $2 million in March, and was coming off career lows of 730 yards in 223 carries and a 3.3-yard average. "This is the part of the business that I hate. . . ," said Chargers President Dean Spanos, who met Monday with Tomlinson and informed him of the decision. "Change involving great players is never easy.

Super Bowls always prompt memories of former players, the guys who never quite made the big game, the guys whose promising careers were severed by any number of reasons, including chronic drug use. Whatever happened to Chuck Muncie, Charger fans might ask? Great running back, had all the tools, just couldn't keep his nose clean. The Chargers during the early 1980s mirrored Muncie: All the talent in the world but they self-destructed every year and fell short of the Super Bowl.

Linebacker Junior Seau stalked off the field, removed his helmet and hurled it to the turf. Then he carried his tantrum to the Charger defensive coaches. "We weren't getting a sack," Seau said. "I couldn't believe it. We should have put more pressure on the quarterback. I'm telling them, 'Blow off the scheme we're using and do something else. Do what we've practiced.' "We were losing, I'm frustrated and I'm thinking, 'Do something more, Junior.' " It was an exhibition game.

You've been to the mall and maybe you've seen a young mother toting a crying baby, pushing a stroller with a screaming toddler, and at the same time trying to keep track of a rambunctious youngster. Or, maybe you've seen Chuck Clausen at work on the Chargers' practice field. Clausen has been hired to babysit Leslie O'Neal, Burt Grossman, Joe Phillips and several more big lugs who are employed as defensive linemen by the Chargers. Good luck.

The best player in the NFL is right down Interstate 5, but the view is blocked by a big head 3,000 miles away. The best player in the NFL speaks in a soft voice, but even when you're nearby he's drowned out by the cacophony generated from the other side of the country. Two men were standing a few yards from the BPITN as he practiced the other day, but he wasn't the subject of conversation. "What do you think of T.O.?" one said to the other. "He's an idiot," was the reply.

Picture a boy in the sixth grade. His mom packs his lunch and scoots him off to the first day of school. He is big for his age. He is deaf in one ear, having had tumors removed. He also has a cleft palate--a harelip, someone cruel would call it--that affects his speech. The boy goes to class. Looks around. Suddenly realizes that he has been placed with the children who are partially or severely retarded. Why? Because he talks funny. Blaise Winter, 11, runs home to his mom, crying. Blauvelt, N.Y.

Eugene Klein, the combative and colorful former owner of the San Diego Chargers who never won a major event in sports until he turned to thoroughbred racing, died early Monday, apparently after suffering a heart attack at his Rancho Santa Fe home. Klein, 69, a native New Yorker who made a fortune on the West Coast in diverse business ventures ranging from automobile sales and real estate to movie production and book publishing, was stricken at his home at 3:50 a.m.

Four decades after Broadway Joe Namath brashly predicted the New York Jets would beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III -- and then came through on that guarantee -- Rex Ryan's Jets have quietly pushed their own pile of chips to the middle of the table. In an itinerary for his players that somehow was obtained by the media, Ryan had set aside Feb. 9, two days after the Super Bowl, for a celebration through the middle of Manhattan. In a divisional playoff game today, under threatening skies, the San Diego Chargers plan to rain on Ryan's premature parade.

Breaking down the San Diego-New York Jets matchup in the AFC divisional playoffs: No-fly zone This game pits San Diego's outstanding pass offense and New York's smothering pass defense. A matchup to watch is Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis on 6-foot-5 Vincent Jackson , who's six inches taller. But Jackson is quick to say that height differential between receivers and defensive backs is often an exaggerated edge. He says he can count on one hand the number of jump-ball fades the Chargers have thrown in recent years, passes that can take advantage of those size mismatches.

Fifty years ago this month, Nov. 22, 1959, to be exact, the Minnesota Vikings ran a reverse play that could have totally defeated the wannabe American Football League. Yet somehow, the AFL survived, flourished and eventually merged with the big guy, the National Football League. The man in the middle of all this, and greatly responsible for what the San Diego Chargers have become, is 82 years old now and is better known for hotels than football teams. But Barron Hilton, the retired chief executive of the Hilton Hotel Corp.

For all of Sunday's surprises -- Oakland stunning Cincinnati, Kansas City shocking Pittsburgh, Detroit and Cleveland in a 75-point shootout -- there was one development NFL fans could see coming a mile away: The slow-motion collapse of the Denver Broncos. Just like last season, the San Diego Chargers delivered the roundhouse that sent Denver to the canvas, this time claiming the outright lead in the AFC West with a 32-3 thumping at Invesco Field. Denver might have looked virtually invincible last month when it got off to a 6-0 start and built a 3 1/2 -game division lead, capped with a win at San Diego.

The USC football team, which has won or shared the last seven Pacific 10 Conference titles, has, for years now, been the closest thing the Los Angeles area has had to a big-league football team. So how would the Trojans' program actually stack up against an NFL team? Reporters Gary Klein and Sam Farmer examined the question, comparing USC with the San Diego Chargers. Here's what they found: Records USC: 12-1 in 2008; 93-22 this decade (88-15 in eight seasons under Pete Carroll)

When San Diego's LaDainian Tomlinson considers his peers, the Chargers running back doesn't necessarily think about Minnesota's Adrian Peterson, Atlanta's Michael Turner or Washington's Clinton Portis. Instead, Tomlinson thinks outside the blocks. "Talking to Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, all these great athletes, I can relate to their mind-set," he said, relaxing at his locker after a recent practice. "I wonder sometimes why I think the way I think. Am I strange because I think I'm a different breed of guy?

Dale Lindsey clicked off the projector. He had run about a dozen plays featuring the San Diego Charger defense. It might have been called a highlight film. Junior Seau was the highlight. "You want more?" asked Lindsey, the Chargers' linebacker coach. "How much time do you have?" No mas, thank you. In his varying alignments at linebacker, with a few plays at defensive end as well, Seau had gone mano-a-mano with offensive players of virtually every job description.

With anger at the Chargers and scorn for Los Angeles, city officials here Wednesday vowed an immediate, vigorous and multifaceted legal challenge to a lawsuit filed by the Chargers that appears a precursor to a potential move to Los Angeles. At a City Hall news conference, Mayor Dick Murphy and City Atty. Casey Gwinn said they found the timing of the suit outrageous, the issues meritless and the venue scandalous.

The NFL is willing to consider a return to its Los Angeles roots. Evidently, so are the San Diego Chargers. While the league is kicking around the notion of playing the 50th Super Bowl in L.A. -- where the first one took place -- the onetime L.A. Chargers appear to be inching closer to a possible return to their birthplace. As is always the case with the on-again, off-again saga of the NFL's flirtation with the nation's second-largest market, nothing is written in stone.

As the end of their season crunched underneath their feet, their faces draped in ski caps, their curses bathed in smoke, the San Diego Chargers were serenaded by the cruelest of songs. From the Heinz Field loudspeakers it blared. From the lips of the black-swathed Pittsburgh Steelers fans it sang. Into the Chargers' heads it taunted. "I'm A Believer." Yep, gotcha again, the Chargers once again making their fans giddy, only to leave them gasping.