This year’s NFL team of destiny … L.A. Chargers

When identifying my annual NFL Team of Destiny, I like to a find a franchise that has been waking up on the wrong side of the bed for a long time, starts every morning driving uphill on the wrong side of the road and spends most weekends swimming upstream on the wrong side of the river.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Los Angeles, née San Diego Chargers.

Let us count the ways the Chargers are in worse shape than a sea turtle at a triathlon:

— They are 9-23 the last two seasons – vintage San Diego Clippers numbers.

— Their only title in their 56-year history came in 1963, when they won the AFL championship.

— Their only Super Bowl appearance came after the 1994 season, when they lost to the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26.

— They have four coast-to-coast road trips on their schedule this season, and unlike the New England Patriots, they fly commercial.

— They are in the highly competitive AFC West, a division so tough defensively, Kim Jong Un won’t even point a nuclear warhead that way for fear it will be intercepted.

— Injuries routinely sideline their best players, many of whom fear losing medical benefits when Obamacare is repealed and replaced.

— Their standout quarterback, Philip Rivers, generally stays healthy, but he is 59 years old.

— Their special-teams unit is the single most beleaguered organization in America, outside of the U.S. Postal Service.

— Their owner, Dean Spanos, makes Dan Snyder look like Art Rooney.

— They will play home games this year in a soccer stadium with 27,000 seats and no pylons.

— They are still unloading office equipment and personnel files from their belated San Diego-to-Los Angeles move.

Here’s the thing:

The Chargers spurned a town that desired them to squat in a town that dismisses them. Nobody in San Diego wanted them to leave and nobody in Los Angeles wanted them to come.*

(* In all fairness, I am probably stretching the truth here – I’m sure you could find 30 or 35 right-minded souls in San Diego who were happy to see the NFL exit stage north, and I’m sure you could find 30 to 35 maniacally misguided, fantasy-infested Angelenos who cheered the arrival of a second Roger Goodell-branded, damaged franchise.)

The Chargers’ marketing campaign is called “Fight for L.A.” – the team will play the next three seasons 13 miles south of downtown Los Angeles in Carson, until it joins the Rams in their new Inglewood stadium in 2020 – but, so far, it’s a losing fight.

Their new logo was vilified, then changed three times in two days. When the latest logo was unveiled at a Clippers-Lakers game, it was booed, as was Chargers backup tight end Jeff Cumberland when he was shown on the jumbotron moments after.

The team’s first preseason game drew an announced crowd of 21,054 – 21,054! Heck, in L.A. you can get 21,000 people to gather just to watch a freeway chase involving a “Baywatch” extra.

The team finally did something right a couple of weeks ago – it offered free Chargers tattoos over a 12-hour period in West Hollywood. Normally this would be too much of a bodily commitment for me, I decided it was an offer I could not refuse: The right price to pledge to my Team of Destiny.

(Yeah, I got inked up. Why not? The Dali Lama’s got Twitter, why can’t Couch Slouch have a tattoo?)

So how exactly is this moribund team going to go from 5-11 to 11-5? Well, the Chargers blew six fourth-quarter leads last season, resulting in Mike McCoy being replaced as head coach by Anthony Lynn, and highly placed sources tell me that Lynn is a fourth-quarter guy.

Anyway, when the Chargers run out onto the U.S. Bank Stadium field in Minneapolis on Feb. 4, 2018, they will become the first homeless franchise with a first-year coach in its first season as second fiddle in a second-rate big city to play in the Super Bowl.

Ask The Slouch

Q. How do you manage to keep the column so sharp and fine-tuned after all these years? (Dan Mullen; Spokane)

A. I know they call blueberries “the new brain food,” but I like to start my day with a heaping bowl of Apple Jacks.

Q. What is a “true freshman”? Is there a false freshman? (Lee Carpenter; College Park, Md.)

A. One of my college roommates was a fifth-year freshman – I believe he is the athletic director there now.

Q. What happens when a statistician and a sportswriter meet at Starbucks? (Jack O’Brien; Fairfax, Va.)

A. They wait for a third person to pay their $8.35 bill.

Q. Why don’t women Ask The Slouch? (Victoria Dailey; Alexandria, Va.)

A. Occasionally they do, but the last time a woman asked a question I could answer was 1983.

Q. Do you think that Maria Sharapova is superstitious, or that she can only afford one tennis outfit per tournament? (John Oetting; Columbia, Md.)

A. Pay the man, Shirley.

Norman Chad is a syndicated columnist. You can enter the $1.25 Ask The Slouch Cash Giveaway. Just email asktheslouch@aol.com and, if your question is used, you win $1.25 in cash!