Alexander: Baseball is over – time to catch up with L.A.’s NFL teams

Alexander: Baseball is over – time to catch up with L.A.’s NFL teams

The world according to Jim:

• See, this is the issue with trying to keep up with everything going on in sports in Southern California: You can’t. At least, you can’t do it while giving the 17 major league and major college attractions in our territory, plus so many others on the fringe, the attention they deserve.  …

• That might explain this, then: In 29 other markets, people have been obsessing about the local NFL team (or, in New York, teams) since … oh, maybe since the 2023 season ended. We are now almost halfway through the 2024 schedule, a few days past the trading deadline, and in many cities coaches and general managers are on hot seats, draft choices have been picked apart, and the grand NFL tradition of Overreaction Monday has turned into Overreaction-what-day-did-you-say-this-was? …

• And in L.A.? We have two possible playoff teams. As long as the Chargers’ offensive line can keep Justin Herbert upright, and as long as Jim Harbaugh can continue to banish “Chargering” from his team’s internal vocabulary, this could continue to be a fun autumn in the team’s new El Segundo training quarters. Meanwhile, the Rams have done another of their “where did they come from” acts and have gone from dead in the water to maybe a playoff contender, which suggests that maybe the NFL should just rename the Coach of the Year award after Sean McVay at some point.  …

• But be honest: How many of you looked around after the Dodgers’ parade and celebration last Friday and decided that now you could afford to spend time thinking about our NFL teams?

(Columnist slowly, tentatively raises his hand.) …

• Before you start setting money aside for Rams playoff tickets, this word of caution: The 49ers made a huge acquisition this week without needing to make a trade. Christian McCaffrey is healthy again. He hasn’t played yet this season and went on injured reserve Sept. 14 with bilateral Achilles tendinitis, after being slowed by a calf injury in training camp. He’s expected to make his season debut Sunday against Tampa Bay. …

• For the record, McCaffrey has played against the Rams twice as a 49er. In 2022 at SoFi, shortly after San Francisco acquired him from Carolina (in part to keep him away from the Rams), the former Stanford star ran 18 times for 94 yards, caught eight passes for 55 and scored twice. Last year in Inglewood, he ran 20 times for 116 yards and a TD. He was inactive when the teams played on the final day of last season in Santa Clara because the 49ers already had the division title sewn up.

If his impact is as much as I think it will be, the Niners (4-4) are about to separate themselves from the pack and the Rams (4-4), Cardinals (5-4) and Seahawks (4-5) are maybe – maybe – in the hunt for a wild-card spot. …

• Not all games on the schedule are created equal. These are the ones to watch:

For the Rams, Nov. 24 against Philadelphia, Dec. 8 against Buffalo (both at SoFi), Dec. 12 against the Niners in Santa Clara, and the week 17 and 18 games (date TBA) at home against the Cardinals and Seahawks. For the Chargers: a Monday night game Nov. 25 at SoFi against Baltimore – the Harbaugh Bowl – followed by road games Dec. 1 at Atlanta and Dec. 8 at Kansas City, a Sunday night game. …

• Will the 8-0 Chiefs still be undefeated by then? There are at least 11 teams rooting hard against them: The nine teams they still must play (Denver twice, Buffalo, Carolina, Cleveland, Houston, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville and the Raiders and Chargers), Baltimore (which at 7-3 still has playoff seeding to think about), and the surviving members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, whose status as the only start-to-finish undefeated and untied team in NFL history is again in jeopardy. …

• Little remembered fact, though: Those 17-0 Dolphins aren’t the only undefeated team in pro football history. The 1948 Cleveland Browns of the All American Football Conference were 14-0. The 1929 Green Bay Packers were 12-0-1, the Canton Bulldogs of the then-infant NFL were 10-0-2 in 1922 and 11-0-1 in 1923, and the Akron Pros were 8-0-3 in 1920 in the first season of the American Pro Football Association (which, two years later, was renamed the National Football League). …

• And consider this as you look at the remainder of their schedule: The Chiefs have won six of their eight games by a touchdown or less (and one of those “lopsided” wins was 28-18 over the 49ers in a rematch of last February’s Super Bowl).

What that stat tells me is not necessarily what you might think. Good teams find ways to win close games. Bad teams find ways to lose them, and then rationalize that they came, oh, so close. …

• (I didn’t mean to mention USC here, honest. It just slipped out.) …

• It was a little surprising that Chargers’ general manager Joe Hortiz didn’t make a move to add receiving help to his 5-3 team at the deadline, especially when a familiar face was available. Mike Williams, deemed expendable by the Jets, instead was traded to Pittsburgh on Tuesday.

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“We like our guys,” Jim Harbaugh said in the immediate aftermath of the deadline, which passed without a Chargers move. The attitude here: We’ll see, even with the understanding that Harbaugh and Hortiz know their personnel better than any of us do. …

• We were talking about games to watch? Here’s a Sunday afternoon game that has nothing to do with the NFL but may be one of the most compelling matchups of the fall: Nov. 24, women’s basketball, defending NCAA champion South Carolina at UCLA, 1 p.m.

How’s that for a measuring stick?

jalexander@scng.com

 

 

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