Bolts From The Blue
NFL.com’s Cynthia Frelund projects the Chargers to finish 10-7 in Jim Harbaugh’s first season as head coach.
The Chargers are 10 weeks into the 2024 season — their first under head coach Jim Harbaugh — and they’ve already exceeded their win total from a year ago with their sixth victory earned last Sunday over the Titans.
With eight games left to go, it’s unknown just how strong the Chargers will finish this season, especially given just how difficult the remaining schedule is compared to the first half of the year.
Starting this week against the 4-6 Bengals (but actually they’re much better than that record, in my opinion), the Chargers will then go on a stretch against three teams that currently hold winning records in the Ravens (7-3), Falcons (6-4), and the Chiefs (9-0). The remaining slate then calms down a tad as they take on the Bucs (4-6), Broncos (5-5), Patriots (3-7), and Raiders (2-7) to round out the rest of the season.
In a recent post by Cynthia Frelund over at NFL.com, the analyst wrote up win projections for all 32 NFL teams and she’s got the Chargers with a win total projection of 10.1 wins while. noting her models shows them having a ceiling of 10.8 wins and a floor of 9.0 wins.
Essentially, if the Chargers split their final eight games, they should land at 10-7 on the season and that’s already a better record than most probably predicted in year one of Jjim Harbaugh. If they go 3-5, they still hit 9-8 and secure a winning record. Barring a total collapse, this Chargers team should be in or just outside the playoffs.
The win-total projection would also put them as the sixth-best team coming out of the AFC which also runs parallel with their projection as the conference’s No. 6 seed should the season end today. For now, they’re essentially trying to stave off the Broncos and Bengals for remainder of the year and, for what it’s worth, those two teams have win projections of 8.6 and 8.0, respectively, per Frelund’s model.
For a little added context, here are the remaining schedules for both the Broncos and Bengals:
Total win-loss record of remaining schedule: 33-33
Total win-loss record of remaining schedule: 32-32
Compare those to the Chargers and their remaining schedule who have a combined win-loss record of 36-32 and you can see that the Bolts have a little bit of a harder left ahead.
Essentially, media pundits are all circling the next four games of the Chargers to see if they’re as legit as their record suggests. If they can come out splitting them, they’re sitting at 8-5 with four teams remaining without a winning record (as of...
