Subscribe
Follow Us
After moving on from league-wide punching bag Brandon Staley and general manager Tom Telesco in December following an embarrassing Thursday Night Football loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, Dean Spanos and the Los Angeles Chargers aren't wasting any time trying to find their next head coach.
“Chargers completed an interview today with 49ers’ defensive coordinator Steve Wilks for their head coach job,” ESPN's Adam Schefter tweeted on Saturday afternoon. Wilks spent three seasons as the Chargers defensive backs coach from 2009 to 2011, when the team was still in San Diego. Since then, Wilks has accumulated some head coaching experience — a single season with the Arizona Cardinals in 2018, and then twelve games as the Carolina Panthers interim head coach in 2022, a job that many believed Wilks should've retained going into 2023 given the fact that the Panthers were 6-6 in his short, interim tenure, after previous head coach Matt Rhule had gone 11-27 in his two-plus years as head coach.
Steve Wilks' interview with the Chargers comes on the heels of reports that Jim Harbaugh is set to interview for the Los Angeles job sometime within the next week. It's not my job to determine whether Wilks will or won't, should or shouldn't get the Chargers job, but it certainly feels like Wilks is currently standing in the shadow of Jim Harbaugh here.
Following a National Championship season at Michigan, Harbaugh's profile has never been higher. But in all reality, the same could be said for Wilks, who has the 49ers defense playing at a championship level in his first season as San Francisco's defensive coordinator.
