SAN DIEGO ---- "Defense wins."
"Deeds not words."
"In it to win it."
Most all of those sappy motivational slogans coaches so love to preach should be shredded, burned and banned for eternity. Not a single one of them has ever thrown a block or made a tackle or stopped Ray Lewis from shooting a gap on a fourth-down play with a game hinging in the balance.
There is one phrase, however, that Chargers coach Norv Turner should take a long, hard look at.
"Safe is death."
A few years back, John Tortorella, a riverboat gambler of a hockey coach, rode that one all the way to a Stanley Cup championship.
If the Chargers are going to survive a season without Jamal Williams, their best defensive player, third-down field goals and fourth-down running plays most certainly aren't the answer.
If Turner was trying to fool the Baltimore Ravens with his fourth-down run call in the final stages of Sunday's 31-26 loss, it would appear the only person he outsmarted was himself.
Lewis, certainly, wasn't fooled. The Ravens' veteran, who brings a certain lumberjack mentality (minus the chain saw) to linebacking, had seen that particular formation on film. He was all but convinced what was coming next. So Lewis decided to take a chance, to push in all his chips.
"When I read it, it's either I make it, or they make it," Lewis said. "I tell my team all the time, 'I'm not going to ask you to do nothing that I won't do myself,' and that's take a risk. So I took a risk and shot it."
"Safe is death."
So it was for Turner on Sunday.
With eight seconds left in the first half and the Chargers facing a third-and-5, Turner sent out Nate Kaeding for a 23-yard field goal. It was a curious call, given that just a few seconds earlier the Chargers converted a fourth-and-2 to keep their drive alive.
"I was going to make sure we got points there," Turner said by way of explanation, adding that, in effect, the Chargers' line had little hope of slowing a Ravens' all-out rush.
Turner, most often, is a full-throttle sort of play caller. Throw the ball. Throw it some more. Be aggressive, take your shots.
On Sunday, he called a reverse against the Ravens. It didn't work. Legedu Naanee lost 5 yards.
Nice try, but running plays of any kind are not going to propel this team past, say, 8-8. This is a passing league, and the good news for the Chargers is that they have weapons galore in that discipline.
"Absolutely, it was the game plan," Chargers wide receiver Vincent Jackson said about testing the Ravens' secondary with deep throws. "We felt like we had the matchups we liked. I think we wanted to go down the field a little more, but we didn't get that opportunity."
Jackson caught six passes for 141 yards and a touchdown. Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers completed 25-of-45 passes for a career-best 436 yards.
Uhhh, Philip, are you sure you can't just throw it every time?
"I mean, you can," Rivers said. "It was a play we just didn't execute there at the end."
It was the safe play. A run. Death.
Throw it to Jackson. Throw it to Antonio Gates. Throw it to Chris Chambers. Throw it to someone, anyone. Just throw it.
Instead, well, instead you get Lewis running untouched toward Darren Sproles, arriving at about the same time as the hand off. Instead you get a play ending in a body slam, football's version of a walk-off home run.
"It didn't look like fourth-and-2 to me. It looked more like fourth-and-1 to me," said Turner, adding that the previous play had somehow exposed a weakness in the Ravens' scheme.
Baltimore coach John Harbaugh, in trying to compliment the Chargers' grittiness, didn't quite put his words together properly. Then again, maybe he did.
"That is a really good football team, a team that knows how to win football games at the end," Harbaugh said. "I guess Ray Lewis knows more."
Contact sports editor Loren Nelson at 760-740-3551 or lnelson@nctimes.com.
