Why the San Diego Chargers Need to Fire Norv Turner as Head Coach

The San Diego Chargers remain living proof of the cliché "that's why they play the games." Norv Turner just wishes they didn't have to...you know, play the games.

Despite a talented offense, one of the league's best quarterbacks and a slew of shake-ups throughout the volatile AFC West, the Chargers have once again failed to deliver on the promise of a championship run, which began with a hopeful 4-1 start and has since turned into a disastrous four-game skid.

Every season is different, but one constant has been the head coach. Turner's coaching style has come under a lot of scrutiny, as he's failed to have his team ready to go at the start of the season for the majority of his tenure.

He was able to avoid a slow start this year, but has earned criticism other ways.

Handed the Division on a Silver Platter

For years, Turner's Chargers have consistently failed to put it together for a 16-game regular season, which is considered to be a necessary component to remaining a head coach in the NFL. It looked like that might finally happen when the Chargers started 4-1, the first time under Turner they've started anything but 2-3 in their first five games.

And it should have been no easier than it was made for Turner this year.

Kyle Orton dug the Denver Broncos into a 1-4 hole, the Raiders lost Jason Campbell for the season and gave up a king's ransom for Carson Palmer and Matt Cassel has had the consistency of cottage cheese (milky and buttery at times, chunky and fragmented at others).

Slow Starts

Under Norv Turner, the Chargers are a combined 12-13 in the first five games of his five seasons—and that's with the 4-1 start this season.

Clearly, getting off to a hot start did nothing to help the Chargers avoid overall mediocrity. Or, in this case, downright despondency. Four straight losses have sent them into the back end of the AFC West race once again, and it will take nothing short of a miracle (or the sheer futility of the AFC West as a whole) for the Chargers to climb back into the race.

So the Chargers were able to overcome their problem with starting slow in the past few seasons, but the Chargers' midseason funk is comparable or even worse to those slow starts. With this performance, though, they have virtually guaranteed that they must win the division in order to make the postseason.

All That Talent, No Results

No. 1 total offense. No. 1 total defense. No. 2 in AFC West. No. 7 in AFC playoff hunt.

That's the way the Chargers' 2010 season ended. For all the stumbling out of the gate, it was the first season since Turner's arrival that the Chargers actually missed the playoffs.

The way Philip Rivers has played throughout his career—and most specifically last season when he led the league with 4,710 yards and added 30 touchdowns against just 13 interceptions—the Chargers should have won far more games than they have.

Can't Put It on Philip Rivers

As the quarterback goes, so goes the team. That's a big reason why many are focusing so heavily on the play of Philip Rivers.

Once again, trace it back to poor discipline. The Chargers ranked 17th in the NFL with 29 turnovers in 2010, which means they lost 16 fumbles. Rivers' 15 interceptions have killed the team this season, but he has been sterling throughout his career. Good players have bad seasons all of the time.

And for the sake of argument, perhaps Rivers feels pressured to put the team on his back and will them to victory, since no one else seems to be taking the initiative to do so.

Losing to Inferior Competition

Beyond the turnovers, this is a team that had an 11-point lead over the Jets twice and gave it up in the second half by allowing the Jets ridiculously slow offense to score 17 on them.

The Chiefs? How about three points in the first half against the league's 10th-worst scoring defense?

The Raiders may be leading the AFC West right now (which isn't exactly bragging rights), but they've been just as mediocre as any other team in the division. Dropping a third straight game to Oakland and a second straight ad Qualcomm Stadium after winning 13 straight against them is just indicative of what direction this Chargers team is headed.

If those three losses were wins, as they should have been, the Chargers would be 7-3 riding high above the AFC West, instead of at 4-6 on the bottom looking up.

Discipline

In the end, it all boils down to discipline. Cold Hard Football Facts tracks scoreability and bendability to measure how efficiently a team scores and stops teams from scoring. They're not directly related to offense and defense respectively, but are indicators of discipline, field position, turnovers and doing the little things right that are often the difference between winning and losing.

The formula measures yards per point scored, as an indicator of how efficiently a team scores and how well it stops opposing teams from scoring. A lower number in scoreability is better, and the opposite is true for bendability.

In both indicators, the Chargers rank in the bottom half of the league: 19th in scoreability at 16.53 yards per point scored (115.71 yards for seven points), and second-worst in bendability at just 13.08 yards per point allowed (91.56 yards for seven points). For comparison's sake, the league average for both is 15.71 (109.97 yards for seven points).

That comes down to a team-wide problem in discipline on the field, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes watching the San Diego Chargers to understand why this is such an epidemic for them.

Erik Frenz is the co-host of the PatsPropaganda and Frenz podcast. Follow Erik on Twitter @ErikFrenz.