Morning Stormcloud! Over the next few weeks we’re going to be looking at evaluating how the Chargers have addressed each position since this time last season. We are not going to be reviewing the incumbent starters as there is plenty of turnover to get through regarding the incoming players. This evaluation will therefore include:
- Returning players who signed a new deal with the team
- External free agents who signed before the May 1st compensation pick exemption deadline
- Players who were added in any of the seven rounds of the 2025 NFL Draft
- Undrafted free agents (UDFA) who signed deals with the team after the draft
- Unsigned players who are listed as camp invites in media reports
Note: If a player has an asterisk after their name (*) this means that they were added during the 2024 season and have been retained
We’ll continue on offense now moving out to the flanks where we’ll find the Wide Receivers!
Outgoing players
- Joshua Palmer (Buffalo Bills)
- Cornelius Johnson (Green Bay Packers)
- Simi Fehoko (Arizona Cardinals)
- Leon Johnson III (unsigned)
- Jaelen Gill (Michigan Panthers of the UFL)
The new look WR room
- Incumbent (4) : Ladd McConkey, Quentin Johnston, Derius Davis, , Brenden Rice
- Returning (3): Jalen Reagor*, Dez Fitzpatrick*, Jaylen Johnson
- In (4): Mike Williams, Tre Harris, Keandre Lambert-Smith, Luke Grimm
Returning
Jalen Reagor, Dez Fitzpatrick and Jaylen Johnson all signed one year contracts worth less than $1,200,000. Reagor saw the most regular season action however none of these contracts will preclude the Chargers from moving on should the young players outplay them. Interestingly there are seven receivers still still on their rookie deals amongst this group which makes for an interesting dynamic.
Free Agents
The single free agent addition is technically an external one although he is a very familiar face. Mike may be a bit of an emotion based return but he does fill a role immediately as the only option at X receiver who has both experience and a connection with Justin Herbert. His ventures to Pittsburgh and New Jersey were not kind to him and he’ll be hungry to prove he can still be a player in this league. Mike may be on the downward slope of his career after his many injuries have shortened his body clock despite him only being 30 years old until mid season. As much as I’d like to see him have some more career defining moment in powder blue I feel it’s more likely that he’s here to play whilst the rookies get up to NFL speed.
Draft
I, like many other analysts, had pegged the Chargers to double dip at the position due to the depth and variety of the class combined with the need for options not named Ladd McConkey. For the second year in a row Hortiz did just that but this time it seems he has finally delivered the right mix of young offensive weapons for Justin Herbert to grow a relationship with without needing to look at options in the next wave of free agents. Tre Harris is a big boundary receiver who can stack corners, box them out and high point the ball in a similar way to a young Mike Williams although clearly not to the point where he would have been worth the 7th overall pick. I was lower on Harris than most and I’m hoping to be proven wrong however the one thing I will agree on is that the fit to the scheme is like a glove. He will need a while to get going though as Ole Miss ran an Air Raid scheme which limited Tre to a very minimal set out of routes. I think there’s a reason he was begging to see the playbook as soon as possible.
Keandre Lambert-Smith is someone I first came across when doing work on Cooper DeJean when the Chargers’ new receiver was at Penn State, he went into my tracker after that game as has been on my radar ever since. KLS transferred to Auburn after graduating from Penn State having had an underwhelming four years, he was one of several of the same types of receiver on a team that was run first so even though he was the leading target man, he wasn’t used as the focus of the offense. He used his extra year of Covid eligibility to go to Auburn under Hugh Freeze and here he finally showed what he could do as the main downfield threat. Jim Harbaugh tried to recruit him back as part of the 2019 class which tells us a bit about why they potentially pushed his pick up by a round as the consensus board had Keandre as a 7th round player. His fit to Roman’s offense is clear to me as downfield speed threat who can push safeties onto their heels with his efficient speed cuts to threaten on post routes but he’s not just a blazer as he showed against DeJean where he exposed Cooper’s slower vertical directional change with eyebrow raising deceleration skills on comeback routes.
UDFA
Luke Grimm was added as some slot depth which was actually a surprisingly high need when you consider that Ladd likely won’t play more than a few snaps of the preseason. The only other receiver with actual experience inside the numbers is Jaylen Johnson after the Chargers focus this off-season has been adding boundary threats. So he definitely has a path to seeing a lot of preseason action and can carve out a path to the practice squad. Grimm impressed in the bowl game against UNLV with 160 yards but he was a consistently good support role all season which resulted in a PFF grade over 72 in 7 of his 13 games last season.
Reasons for change
Aside from the very successful addition of Ladd, this front office has opted not to add receivers with any significant capital so it was inevitable at some point this off-season they would bring on multiple players to replace the subpar production they saw from Quinten Johnston, Joshua Palmer and the other experiments on the outside. The changeover has been thorough and there is one major signpost that has been revealed by all these moves: the receivers brought in by the old regime were not good enough and their days on the roster are numbered. QJ is going to be a candidate for a move at the trade deadline if Tre and KLS can break into the rotation because he has very little place on this team, in fact his only asset over the others is that he can is more dangerous on low cross field routes than the others however that’s not enough to warrant his salary.
Another indication is that Brenden Rice may have been an owner’s pick, there’s usually one in every draft unless your GM has earned some trust, with Rice he has the triple layered allure that brings bigger voices into the room. He had the name, the big local school and the production. The fact he wasn’t able to see the field with the meagre quality in front of him plus the amount of receivers that have been added in front of him makes it seem more likely than not that a Spanos family member was involved to some degree.
Position Reset Evaluation
This is yet another easy positive result for me as the team replaced two very injury prone players in Simi Fehoko and Joshua Palmer with two young players with consistent availability on top of their obvious long term potential. However that’s not even the best part of this reset for me, it’s the clarity that it has provided in regards to positional roles. Instead of a jumble of body types none of which fit traditional roles Greg Roman now knows that Mike Williams is going to start at X until Tre Harris is up to speed, QJ will start at Z until KLS proves he is better than him and Ladd is in the slot. Even the backups and practice squad candidates have specific roles they are aiming at. I am all for cross-role learning to ensure there is contingency for injuries but you can’t let that dictate where your resources are spent and I’m very glad to see the back of Telesco’s failed position-less strategy.
The farther from Spanos medling we get the better. I hope JH2 has the B…. to stay true.
Another added benefit to the WR group is that these younger ( and unproven ) players are a lot cheaper that buying one. Sure hope they work out.
Great work, Ryan. Keep it up!
I might have been a little higher on the WR Reset if a marquee free agent had been signed (eg, Davante). But looking at the position group now, I can see the vision and the potential.
You’ve also understood the brief when writing opinion pieces. Keep including speculative but fun ideas (ie, the Spanoses being responsible for Rice’s signing) and you’ll become an engagement king in no-time 🤣
I like these articles but I find your method of identifying outgoing players a bit odd. Intuitively, outgoing players are outgoing this offseason after having ended last season with the Chargers in some capacity, whether active roster, practice squad, IR, or whatever. In this case, Cornelius Johnson was waived at the beginning of last season, signed with Green Bay in September, and spent the season on their practice squad, so intuitively I wouldn’t think of him as outgoing.
Anyway, obviously this is trivial. Enjoying the articles.