SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Chargers fired Mike McCoy following a second straight last-place finish in the AFC West and a third straight season out of the playoffs.
The team announced McCoy’s firing about an hour after the Chargers lost 37-27 to the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.
McCoy had said in a postgame news conference he hoped to be back next year. He won’t get that chance.
McCoy was 27-37 in four seasons. The Chargers earned a wild-card berth in his first season, 2013, and beat Cincinnati in a road game before losing to Denver in the divisional round. The Chargers were 8-4 going into December 2014 before going 1-3 to miss the playoffs.
They followed that by going 4-12 last year and 5-11 this year.
"Our team’s disappointing performance has not matched this team’s potential and has fallen short of the demanding standards that we seek to impose throughout our organization," John Spanos, the Chargers’ president of football operations, said in a statement." Spanos is the son of team chairman Dean Spanos and the grandson of owner Alex Spanos.
John Spanos had a hand in hiring McCoy and general manager Tom Telesco in January 2013, after Norv Turner and A.J. Smith were fired.
McCoy had a year left on his contract.
The Chargers finished the season with five straight losses. They’ve lost 23 of their last 32 games overall and 13 of their last 14 AFC West games dating to late in the 2014 season.
Firing McCoy took care of one uncertainty hanging over the franchise.
Dean Spanos has until Jan. 15 to decide whether to move the team to the Los Angeles area and join the Rams in a stadium scheduled to open in Inglewood in 2019. A Chargers-written ballot measure seeking $1 billion in hotel occupancy taxes to help fund a new downtown stadium was soundly defeated on Nov. 8.
Last year, Spanos was in the process of trying to move the team to Carson to share a stadium with the rival Raiders. That plan was defeated by fellow NFL owners in January, but Spanos was given the option to move to L.A. if he couldn’t come up with a way to replace aging Qualcomm Stadium.
The Rolling Stones’ "The Last Time" played on the PA during a break in the action after a Chiefs field goal made it 37-20 late in the game.
The game didn’t have the same emotional feel as the 2015 season finale, when players went back out on the field to greet the thousands of fans who stuck around after what many thought would be the team’s final game in San Diego.
"It didn’t have any similar feeling to last year," Philip Rivers said. "It was hard to recreate that. It’s hard to recreate a goodbye. It’s like saying goodbye to someone at the airport and then their flight gets delayed, You can’t say goodbye all over again."
