There Is Electricity in the Stan Diego Air

By MIKE DOWNEY

Nov. 30, 1992 12 AM PT

SAN DIEGO — Jan. 5, 1993, will be the 30th anniversary of the day the San Diego Chargers won the championship of the American Football League.

Jan. 16, 1993, will be the 10th anniversary of the day the San Diego Chargers last appeared in a playoff game of the National Football League.

Jan. 31, 1993, will be the day Super Bowl XXVII is won by . . . the San Diego Chargers?

Hey, why not?

A team can dream.

“Our owner (Alex Spanos) will smile a lot more when we make the playoffs,” Charger linebacker Gary Plummer said after Sunday night’s 27-3, post-Thanksgiving carving of the Raiders. “It will be our Christmas gift to him.”

A few weeks ago, the owner couldn’t have turned San Diego into a Super Bowl team unless he was on a first-name basis with Aladdin.

No 0-4 team has ever come back to be in a Super Bowl. No 0-4 team has ever been to the playoffs.

But something definitely is happening down here.

Something definitely has gotten into these guys.

Los Angeles got struck by 11 bolts of lightning Sunday night. Could be Pasadena will be, too. Nobody else from the AFC strikes terror into anybody’s hearts these days. Not Buffalo, not Miami, not Houston, not Denver. And the more you watch San Diego, the more it makes you think: “Why not San Diego?” The more these Chargers play, the better they look.

Stan Humphries, in particular. The man can quarterback, folks. He is turning this town into Stan Diego.

And now that his teammates know that they have themselves a quarterback, their confidence grows and grows.

As does Humphries’.

“We’re not the team the Chargers used to be,” he said.

Back when Bobby Ross and Bobby Beathard went with Bobby Gagliano during the brief, experimental Bobby Ball era, this was a team that looked more passable than possible. The elusive Search for Another Dan Fouts continued. Jim McMahon took his headbands and his sunglasses and split. Billy Joe Tolliver jumped off the Tallahachee Bridge, or wherever he went. John Friesz never made it to the opening huddle.

The Chargers were one lightning bolt short of a storm.

“I’ve tried to step in,” Humphries said. “I try to be a leader as much as I can.”

Well, to paraphrase the late, great San Diego area resident Dr. Seuss:

Yes, you can, Stan. Stan, you can.

The Raiders, who have held four opponents to three points or fewer, were barely able to hold Humphries and the Chargers to three touchdowns.

Yes, they did self-destruct. They got kicks blocked, got passes intercepted, got stripped of the football, got outhustled to the football, got penalties at the worst possible times and got stiff necks from watching Marion Butts and Ronnie Harmon fly by. Yet I’m not sure this was so much a case of the Raiders being unimpressive as of the Chargers being impressive.

Stan Diego is tough and getting tougher.

Stanley Richard, a free safety who is making every bit the impact Stanley Humphries is, made another interception Sunday and said afterward: “Before, there were a lot of questions about whether or not we were a playoff team. What happened in this game was that the lights were turned on and people saw us beat the Raiders. No one has really seen us. This game, on national television, everyone could see us. We were in the spotlight.”

And might stay there.

Who knows? Sunday, Sunday night . . . maybe television will even put San Diego in the spotlight again some Monday night. This team has stars and this team has stars in the making. There are linemen like Lesley O’Neal and Blaise Winter who have been around too long without enough national notice. Gill Byrd is still going strong at cornerback, 10 years in the league. And there is a first-round rookie lineman named Chris Mims, who got pretty much the ultimate praise from his coach:

“Another great game for him,” Ross said.

At 55, a head coach in the NFL for the first time, Ross must have wondered what he had gotten himself into, four weeks into this season. But then he got himself a quarterback. And he got the Chargers to quit committing harmful penalties and doubly harmful turnovers. And now he says: “I think the things that we’ve been talking about and harping on are starting to pay off. We’re a team that’s playing with a lot of confidence right now.”

Enough to go from 0-4 to a Super Bowl?

Hey, why not?

Lightning can’t strike twice until it strikes once.