One of the traits the Chargers value and also what they'd like to vary about Ryan Mathews can be summed up in a first-quarter play during the Chargers’ game at New England earlier this season.
After taking a pass in the flat, Mathews charged ahead and straight into Patriots safety Patrick Chung, taking the hit to Chung and leaving the defender clearly stunned for a time. It was a bit of an answer-back, as Chung had stoned Mathews pretty well on the running back’s previous carry.
The Chargers loved what Mathews showed in the latter play. But they have long worried about it as well.
See, while the 6-foot, 218-pound Mathews has yet to miss a game in 2011 he has also been unavailable for portions of three of the Chargers’ seven games due to calf, thumb and groin injuries. This follows a rookie season in which he missed four games and played 25 or fewer snaps in eight others due mostly to a high ankle sprain but also other maladies.
Mathews’ status for Sunday’s game against the Green Bay Packers is iffy, at best, as he has been unable to practice this week with a groin strain. However, running backs coach Ollie Wilson said, in part because of an increased toughness he has seen in Mathews this season, “I’m not so sure he’s not going to play.”
Regardless, this is not so much about whether Mathews plays Sunday as much as it is about how much and how well he plays for the duration.
“He’s a very physical runner,” head coach Norv Turner said. “He initiates collisions a lot, and we can help him in that way and just continuing to get on the boundary and get out of bounds and some of the things when the play’s dead, let it end.”
The irony in Mathews’ current injury is that it is the result of a play in the fourth quarter on Monday in which he did get out of bounds as the Chargers were driving to the tying score. It was a few feet off the sideline that Kansas City linebacker Justin Houston tugged on Mathews’ leg as he went down.
Mathews left the game after the next play and did not return.
“I told him, ‘I think you did the right thing and unfortunately it’s not exact science and sometimes it’s going to happen that way,’ “ Wilson recounted. “I think it’s just unlucky in that situation.”
But a player can also make his own luck.
The Chargers aren’t exactly looking for Mathews to make like LaDainian Tomlinson increasingly did and actually look to avoid contact. But Tomlinson was uncannily smart about when to extend a play and when not to, which contributed to his voluminous touches each year and his not missing a single game to injury from the first game of the 2001 season through the first game of 2009.
“We’ve been spoiled now,” Wilson said. “I mean, LT. We’ve been spoiled.”
The Chargers aren’t so much looking to make Mathews something he’s not as to simply have him learn.
Mathews, whose 851 scrimmage yards rank seventh in the NFL, declined an interview request Thursday. But Wilson spoke to the challenge of a young running back learning prudence while also trying to set a tone – and in Mathews’ case, perhaps shed an image.
“It’s against my nature to say a tailback is too physical,” Wilson said. “But with that being said, it’s more like he’s got to be logical.”
The only way for that to happen is with experience. Mathews has already played four more snaps this season (295) than he did all of 2010. And there have been plenty of plays Wilson has been able to point out to Mathews where he could have gotten lower, gotten turned or gotten out of bounds.
“He has been better,” Wilson said. “But yet there are still those times where he’ll give himself up and somebody will catch him, and the next thing you know he’s getting hurt.”
Part of the trial for any running back is that he is so often the focal point of an offense, relied upon to set a tempo. Very few plays in football set a tempo better than a running back fighting through tackles.
Turning a 5-yard gain into an eight-yard gain is fine, but “he’s also got to be smart to know when he’s got to get down and when he doesn’t,” Wilson said.
As for the injury-prone label that followed Mathews from college and that he has been unable to get rid of through a season-and-a-half, along with the accompanying questions about Mathews’ toughness, Wilson acknowledges it’s a cloud hovering over his pupil. But the coach has seen growth, such as when Mathews asked back in after injuring his thumb at New York and came back in to finish the game at Denver, gaining a career-high 125 yards before having to be carted to the locker room.
“He’s already fought through a couple things and came back,” Wilson said. “No matter how much he’s been hurt, he’s shown to me that he’s got a lot of toughness. He’s a tough kid. There’s things hurting that he doesn’t even (acknowledge). It’s like, ‘Hey, you alright?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
“I think the number one fear he has is that somebody says, ‘Ryan, you’re not trying to help us.’ … He’s got guys here that he knows count on him, and he’s going to do whatever he can to get there.”
