Why Chargers’ Joey Bosa is already impressed with Jim Harbaugh

Los Angeles Chargers star pass-rusher Joey Bosa has had Jim Harbaugh as a head coach for only a month but already seems impressed with the 60-year-old. 

"We sat down and probably talked for 30 minutes, an hour a couple of weeks ago," Bosa said about Harbaugh during a recent chat with Jared Schwartz of the New York Post. "Great first impressions. I have a lot of confidence in him and the staff that he’s bringing around him. I think he seems like a really genuine guy, which you don’t find that a lot in coaches all the time. He’s interesting. He loves football more than anything. I think all he wants to do is win. The way he talked about his feelings toward this job and toward the future was pretty exciting." 

Harbaugh served as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers from 2011 through 2014, guiding the franchise to Super Bowl XLVII. However, San Francisco lost that game to the Baltimore Ravens, and Harbaugh was officially introduced as the new head coach of the Michigan Wolverines in late December 2014, where he led the  school to a national title. Michigan's 34-13 victory over the Washington Huskies in the 2024 College Football Playoff National Championship gave the Wolverines their first national title since the 1997 campaign. 

Meanwhile, the Chargers have made just two playoff trips since they landed Bosa with the third overall pick of the 2016 NFL Draft. Los Angeles lost a divisional-round postseason game to the New England Patriots in January 2019, and the Chargers later squandered a 27-0 lead en route to dropping a wild-card matchup versus the Jacksonville Jaguars in January 2023. 

"That’s an expectation for sure," Bosa said about Harbaugh turning the Chargers into a top-tier organization. "I’d like to win game one first, then we can talk about Week 2 and then Week 3. Sometimes getting caught up with all the Super Bowl talk and all the hype gets you unfocused and worrying about the wrong things when you should just be worrying about what’s in front of you." 

As of Monday afternoon, DraftKings Sportsbook listed the Chargers as +2500 betting underdogs to win Super Bowl LIX next February. Bosa seems disinterested in such chatter ahead of springtime workouts. 

"There’s a lot of talk of Super Bowl every year, and every year I kind of have a similar answer like, 'alright, let’s see how the first week goes and then we’ll talk about that,'" Bosa added during his conversation with Schwartz.