Even for those pundits who might have not known a ton about O’Leary before he was hired, they have a lot of trust in Harbaugh to identify the coach for the job, even if he’s under the radar.<\/p>\n
They believe there’s something with O’Leary that brings confidence he can succeed.<\/p>\n
“This is the fun part about covering the NFL, you learn every offseason then August comes around and you really won’t know until the games start. I do trust Harbaugh,” The Ringer’s Sheil Kapadia said. “He has been, in college and the NFL, he’s got the rolodex that when he identifies someone. I trust him and give him the benefit of the doubt there. Certainly something we won’t know until the games start.”<\/p>\n
Helman added: “We obviously don’t know how well it’s going to go and I’m sure he’s got a big learning curve heading into the NFL, but I’m intrigued in a good way. For you to identify this guy instead of going with someone who’s already in the NFL or a bigger name, it must mean Minter, or someone, saw something in him that made him feel confident about this.”<\/p>\n
As is such with any first-time NFL playcaller, we won’t know anything for certain until the regular season kicks off next September.<\/p>\n
But one thing for sure is the Chargers defense will have a number of eyes on them that are excited to see O’Leary and his unit.<\/p>\n
“You’re in wait and see mode, but Jim has done a pretty consistent job of surrounding himself with the right coordinators over time,” Mays said. “The fact he identified Jesse, Mike Macdonald was [at Michigan], the Harbaugh’s overall deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to who’s calling the plays on both sides of the ball.”<\/p>\n
Rapoport added: “The Chargers have done very, very well with first time NFL coordinators who are dynamic personalities, who can help them figure it out. To me, I think it was pretty promising.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even for those pundits who might have not known a ton about O’Leary before he was hired, they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2064],"tags":[98782,37,241,103399,7,34,38,1014,262,2444,2443,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-748942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-chargers","8":"tag-2026-offseason-editorial","9":"tag-app-homepage","10":"tag-chargers","11":"tag-chris-oleary","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-homepage-cp","14":"tag-homepage-headlines","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-los-angeles-chargers","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-losangeleschargers","19":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116062696450500993","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}