There May Be No Saving Private Ryan

Here’s a new theory: Maybe Ryan Leaf is a unifying force for the San Diego Chargers.

Everyone else against Leaf.

The latest Leaf saga this week found his teammates siding with reporters when Leaf kept them waiting 30 minutes, a cell phone to his ear, before answering questions about whether he played golf with a sore wrist he earlier predicted would keep him out of the Oakland Raider game Sunday.

Players rolled their eyes at Leaf, and one said somebody should call Leaf’s phone to see if he was really talking to anyone.

Anybody have the number?

“Yeah,” another player said. “It’s 588-JERK.”

That’s how far it has gone.

This is an 0-7 team that needs a victory to end speculation it could be the first NFL team to go 0-16.

How do the players deal with Leaf, who by the way, said he only chipped and putted?

“With who?” safety Rodney Harrison said.

Leaf, of course.

“With who?” Harrison said again. “That’s how I deal with it.”

Jim Harbaugh will start at quarterback Sunday, but Coach Mike Riley has not announced whether Leaf or Moses Moreno will be the backup.

Although Leaf has been practicing, his agent Leigh Steinberg said Leaf’s wrist still isn’t ready for him to play.

“He’s anxious to play. He’s injured,” Steinberg said. “For the first two years, much of the criticism has been understandable. Now it’s time to give Ryan Leaf a break and allow him to grow and mature into a front-line quarterback.”

Leaf is a sidelight for the moment.

Unlikely as it sounds, the Chargers have a certain amount of confidence this week.

That’s because they lost a close game to the Raiders, 9-6, in the season opener, even though Leaf threw three interceptions and lost a fumble.

Since, the Raiders have improved to 6-1 and the Chargers have yet to win.

“You could say that game was obviously a setback mentally and we couldn’t recover,” linebacker Junior Seau said. “Whenever you lose a close game such as that, it carries on.

“We’re sitting 0-7. That didn’t help.”

Add the rivalry and intensity of a game for which police presence at Qualcomm Stadium is being tripled, and it’s about as big a game as a winless team can expect.

Someone asked Seau if the Chargers really hate the Raiders.

“Hate is a strong word,” Seau said. “Yes.”

A game that feels as if it means something is a nice distraction for a team more used to weekly quarterback sagas, and increasingly, speculation that Riley will lose his job after only two seasons despite being saddled with an untenable quarterback situation.

“Yeah, unfortunately that’s how it is,” Harrison said. “If the team’s not winning, normally the first to go is coaches, and after that players. I think he’s really gotten a bad rap. We’re out there on the field. It’s not his fault.

“He can only shoulder so much blame.”

It would be an injustice if Riley pays the price for the Leaf problem he inherited. (Don’t June Jones and Bobby Beathard look smarter all the time for getting out?)

No matter what, the Chargers need to resolve the Leaf situation so they can make decisions about next season.

“I’ve got a dilemma here. We’re doing everything we can to win,” Riley said. “It’s been true all along, any quarterback we’ve got who can come out and make the difference in winning the ballgame, he will play the games.”

As for Leaf: “If he ends up being the guy to do that, plus we get to find out more about him playing in games, that’d be good too.”

The off-the-field evaluation is pretty much complete: There’s nothing particularly serious about Leaf’s latest offenses, but they stamp him as unreliable.

The final on-the-field evaluation is pending.

“I feel until he gets on the field, if and when that comes, that’s really when it’s going to happen,” Riley said. “We’re going to continue to work with it and see eventually where he does fit in.”

The Leaf supporters are disappearing and a decision looms. If the Chargers trade or release him before June 1, they’ll face more than a $3-million charge against the salary cap.

After June 1, that figure would be about $1.8 million, which doesn’t sound prohibitive.

“I still think there’s a reasonable chance he’s going to be there,” Steinberg said.

“If Peyton Manning were playing behind this offensive line, he’d be struggling. It’s time someone owned up to the fact that the offensive personnel on this team does not afford any quarterback the opportunity to go to the Pro Bowl.”

SEEMS LIKE A SUPER-LONG TIME AGO

Not many players are left from the Charger team that lost to the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XXIX.

Six seasons later, the remaining players on the active roster are Seau, Harrison, kicker John Carney, offensive tackle Vaughn Parker, defensive tackle John Parella and long snapper David Binn.

“Those guys back then when I was a rookie said, ‘Hey, you better appreciate it and enjoy it because you never know if it’s going to come again,’ ” Harrison said.

“I thought I was going to go to the Super Bowl every year. ‘Hey, this is fun. I could get used to this. This is easy.’

“Man, how things turn around.”

Seau takes a pragmatic approach.

“Being in the National Football League, if you’re one to go through your whole career and have more upsides than downsides, you’re fortunate,” he said.

“With the changing of the guard with players, the free-agency market, salary cap, the evolution of the game has changed. We’re changing right with it. Hopefully we can balance it out where it can work for us. We don’t have a grasp on that right now.”

The Chargers also have endured a coaching churn, going from Bobby Ross in the Super Bowl to Kevin Gilbride in 1997 to Gilbride and Jones in 1998 to Riley last season.

Could the Chargers also go from Super Bowl to 0-16 in six years?

“I can’t even fathom any team going like that,” Harrison said. “I can’t. . . . Nah, it won’t happen. It won’t happen.”

Their most obvious remaining chances to win are Nov. 5 at Seattle, Dec. 3 against the 49ers and Dec. 17 at Carolina.

THERE’S NO DEFENSE

The defensive problems Bud Carson has been brought in to fix for the St. Louis Rams are most obviously illustrated by the increase in points given up--from 15.1 a game to 32.6.

But the dramatic drop-off is in the pass defense, which is giving up 273 yards a game and has slipped to 29th in the league after finishing a modest 20th last season.

Coach Mike Martz has benched defensive end Kevin Carter and cornerback Todd Lyght--both Pro Bowl players last season.

Carter, with only three sacks this season after leading the NFL with 17 last season, is taking the blame for a toothless pass rush, although Carter angrily pointed out he had only four sacks at the same point last season.

Lyght has become a target in the secondary and has only one interception after six last season.

FLORIDA FLOPS

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are 3-4 and Jacksonville linebacker Hardy Nickerson, a key free-agent loss for the Buccaneers in the off-season, told the Tampa Tribune the team has “a lot of Indians, but there’s no chiefs over there.”

Ahem. Nickerson’s Jaguars are a troubled 2-6.

“I think they’ve got enough problems to worry about up there,” Tampa Bay safety John Lynch said. “They’ve taken a team that was 14-2, now they’re 2-6. So they’ve got their own issues to deal with.”