Beating Titans hardly vindication for Chargers

The question of the hour after San Diego won its first playoff game in 13 years Sunday was, "How does it feel to get that monkey off your back?"

Maybe Curious George is gone, but he's been replaced by Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts.

Chimps to champs for the Chargers, whose next playoff game comes against the defending Super Bowl winners.

The celebrating should be muted in San Diego.

Sure, the Chargers won a postseason game -- a phenomenon that really isn't all that uncommon in most of the football world, but seemed wondrous in San Diego after it lost home playoff games inexplicably to the New York Jets three years ago in overtime, and by blowing a 21-13 lead in the last five minutes to New England last year.

Winning a postseason game doesn't mean vindication has arrived for the front office, either.

The notion that the firing of Marty Schottenheimer by general manager A. J. Smith is now justified because Marty never won a playoff game, and now new coach Norv Turner has, is a little silly.

All Turner has done, by leading the Chargers to an 11-5 regular-season record and a home playoff win over Tennessee, is get San Diego back to where Schottenheimer had the team a year ago with his 14-2 record and a first-round playoff bye. The Chargers are still one game from the AFC championship, same as last year.

It was a nice comeback win Sunday over the Titans, but, hey, the Chargers were favored by 10 over a team run by Vince Young, who is the most dangerous running quarterback in the league and never ran once against San Diego because he has a bum knee.

The Chargers will be similarly lucky against Manning only if the NFL declares 20-yard pass plays illegal.

Losing to wild-card Tennessee would have ranked somewhere between the yucky playoff loss to New York and the understandable loss to the mid-dynasty Patriots, and the Chargers knew it.

"Most everybody, and we in the locker room, expected (us) to win this game," said quarterback Philip Rivers afterward. "That's not a slight on the Titans ... but when you play at home and you're on a six-game winning streak, you're supposed to win."

Exactly. But about that six-game winning streak ...

The Chargers certainly salvaged an embarrassingly mediocre (5-5) start with a big finish, but it wasn't like taking a wagon train over the Rockies. The only team San Diego faced with a winning record over the final six was the Titans -- in a gutsy comeback, overtime win in Tennessee, but only after the Chargers were decisively outplayed for more than three quarters.

It's hard to be impressed by this San Diego team. Yet.

They won their division over three of the AFC's bottom-dwellers -- Oakland, Kansas City and Denver, all losing teams.

I know what you're thinking. The Chargers did hand the defending champion Colts one of their losses in their 13-3 season -- a 23-21 heart-stopper in dripping-wet Qualcomm Stadium on Nov. 11.

I'm wondering if anyone thinks that really matters now. Manning suffered his career off-target day, throwing six interceptions, perhaps thinking he was filming a public service spot for an NFL charity, the floundering Chargers.

Even so, Indianapolis still should have won the game. At least until Commander Clutch, Mr. Two-Time Super Bowl Winning Kicker Adam Vinatieri shanked the one boot in his career that proved him human -- a 29-yarder with 1:31 left. That, my friends, was how the Chargers had their biggest victory of the year.

One of the best things about that win, as it turned out, was to give Turner a chance to show off his coaching chops.

"I yelled, 'Miss it,' when Vinatieri kicked that last time," Turner said Sunday. "I yelled as loud as I could, and he pushed it right."

OK, it actually was a chance for the stoic Chargers coach to show off his oft-hidden sense of humor, and we would like to encourage more of that.

But the fact remains, this Chargers-Colts rematch will be more of a test of Turner's coaching magic than the soggy wrestling decision over the Titans.

By the way, the San Diego offense wasn't exactly sparkling in that November game versus Indy. Fourteen of their 23 points came on return man Darren Sproles' remarkable day, one touchdown on a kickoff and another on a punt.

Anyway, somebody jump in here if you think anything has happened to prove there's been a big-time upgrade in the coaching situation in San Diego, or that the Chargers, as a whole, are much better off this year than last.

The Chargers have merely won a playoff game. Now let's see if we should be impressed.

(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)