Tomlinson gets Chargers out of mile-high hole
DENVER — LaDainian Tomlinson ran by Jim Brown, Emmitt Smith and, with supremacy in the AFC West at stake, all those poor souls in Broncos blue.
Tomlinson scored four touchdowns Sunday, leading the San Diego Chargers to a stunning 35-27 victory over Denver, one that included a 17-point comeback in the final 1 1/2 quarters.
“We’re a relentless group of guys,” said Tomlinson, whose team overcame a 21-point deficit to win at Cincinnati a week earlier. “We feel like we’re never out of a football game, no matter how much we’re down. You’ve got to keep playing against us because we feel like we can score at any time.”
That’s certainly true of Tomlinson, who made NFL history Sunday with his 100th touchdown in a record 89 games; he now has 102. That eclipses the mark that had been held by Brown and Smith, each of whom needed 93 games to score 100 touchdowns.
In his latest flurry, Tomlinson has scored 19 times in six games. Three of those touchdowns came in the second half against the Broncos (7-3), when San Diego wiped out a 24-7 deficit and all but silenced a once-jubilant crowd.
San Diego (8-2) scored once in its first six possessions before punctuating its final four with four touchdowns on short-field drives of 60, 58, 55 and 23 yards.
The go-ahead score was a five-yard pass from Philip Rivers to Vincent Jackson, who made a leaping catch and got his tiptoes inbounds, Baryshnikov style. That gave the Chargers a 28-27 lead, one later bolstered by a final Tomlinson touchdown.
“You give them the ball at midfield and they don’t have far to go,” lamented Coach Mike Shanahan, who made the head-scratching decision to stop running the ball after doing it so effectively in the first half.
The low point for San Diego came with 9 minutes 25 seconds remaining in the third quarter, when Darrent Williams returned an interception 31 yards for a touchdown. So gleeful was the bundled crowd, the stands were actually bouncing.
“You make a critical error like that interception for a touchdown, on the road, and throw in the mix that it’s Denver and the scoring defense that they have, you usually don’t come away with the win,” Rivers said. “But nobody panicked.”
The Chargers had challenges to overcome from the start. Their defense was playing without star linebacker Shawne Merriman, serving a four-game suspension for violating the banned-substances policy, and without defensive tackle Luis Castillo, nursing a sprained ankle. Then, during the game, it lost linebackers Shaun Phillips and Carlos Polk, and safety Marlon McCree -- all starters -- for various stretches.
It got so bad, Coach Marty Schottenheimer said, that “we literally had trouble finding guys to put out on the field.”
“I felt like the little Dutch boy running around to fill the holes,” Schottenheimer said.
Somehow, the holes got filled. They must have, considering the Broncos had only 84 of their 326 yards in the fourth quarter, when they needed to burn the clock.
“It’s frustrating,” quarterback Jake Plummer said. “As an offense, you want to be consistent. If you don’t move the ball or at least change the field position ... we weren’t able to accomplish either.”
Things won’t get any easier for the Broncos, whose next three opponents -- Kansas City, Seattle and San Diego -- all have winning records. And Merriman will be back for next month’s rematch with the Chargers.
San Diego, meanwhile, is atop the division and has even bigger goals in mind. Now that Indianapolis has lost, the entire AFC could be up for grabs.
“It does feel wide open,” Tomlinson said. “When a team is undefeated you kind of feel at the time like they’re kind of untouchable.... We’re sitting there looking at Indy thinking, ‘Man, it’s like they’re unbeatable. Peyton [Manning] is really having a great year.’ But when they go down, it’s like anything can happen.”
As Tomlinson and his teammates have shown the last two weeks, anything can happen.
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