Jim Harbaugh has never lost five straight games as a head coach at any level. He is losing them now.
CBS Sports slotted Harbaugh third on its post-Week 2 hot seat rankings, behind Todd Bowles in Tampa and Aaron Glenn with the Jets. For a coach who arrived in Los Angeles as the guaranteed fix, that is a remarkable place to be in September.
The losses are historically bad
The Chargers are the first team ever to start 0-2 with both losses coming against teams that lost 14 or more games the previous season. They fell to Arizona in Week 1 and Las Vegas in Week 2.
Counting last season’s playoffs, Los Angeles has dropped five in a row and averaged 10 points per game over that stretch. That is not a slump. That is a team that has forgotten how to score.
New offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel has the unit averaging 14 points per game in 2026. Justin Herbert has three interceptions and a 13% off-target rate, which is the worst stretch of his professional career.
This is the whole problem with the hire
Harbaugh was brought in because his teams are supposed to be physical, disciplined and ruthless in the fourth quarter. The Chargers are currently none of those things, and they are losing to bad teams, which is the one thing a Harbaugh team is never supposed to do.
The schedule does not offer relief. The next two games are at Buffalo and at Seattle, and five of the next seven opponents won a playoff game last season. An 0-4 start is well within reach.
Bowles is the more urgent case
Tampa Bay sits at 0-2 and tied for last in the NFC South. The Buccaneers fumbled four times in a 33-27 Week 1 loss at Cincinnati, then lost their home opener to Deshaun Watson and the Browns, who scored on a 12-play, 68-yard fourth-quarter drive to go up 23-19.
It is the first 0-2 start for a Bowles-coached Tampa team since 2014. He already fired his offensive coordinator, special teams coordinator, quarterbacks coach and cornerbacks coach after missing the playoffs in 2025, which means there is nobody left to fire except himself.
“Bowles could be the first coach fired this season if things don’t turn around,” wrote CBS Sports’ Tyler Sullivan.
Nobody gets fired in Week 3
Precedent says the first firing lands around Week 5. Carolina cut Matt Rhule loose after Week 5 in 2022, and the Jets dumped Robert Saleh after Week 5 in 2024.
Harbaugh is not going anywhere this season. He has too much capital, too much recent success and too expensive a contract. But the larger conversation around the Chargers has shifted from playoff seeding to organizational direction in fourteen days.
“If the floor does fall out from under them over the next couple of months, the entire operation’s future is in doubt, from the quarterback to the head coach,” Sullivan wrote.
That sentence would have been unthinkable in August. It is fair in September.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.