It’s not often that a team is so dominant that it forces other teams to make roster and schematic decisions specifically geared toward beating them, but that’s exactly what the Los Angeles Chargers are doing in response to the Kansas City Chiefs’ recent dominance.
During an interview this week, Los Angeles Chargers general manager Tom Telesco revealed that the team pays special attention to the Chiefs when constructing the team and planning for the future, even though they try not to overdo it.
“You talk about both because you want to balance it,” Telesco said according to Lindsey Thiry of ESPN.com. “You don’t want to be a team that’s just building to beat one other team and forget that we got to play the way we think we need to play to win, to beat the other teams in the division and everybody else that we play. . . . You like to be a little bit more on the offensive and ‘Hey, this is how we’re going to play and this is how teams have to stop us.’ But you can’t help but to see the Super Bowl champions in our division. We have to beat them.”
It’s a bold strategy to focus so much on one team, but it sends a clear message to the Chiefs about just how much respect they have from their division rivals.
[ESPN]
