You want to see a collection of 300-pound men positively giddy despite being exhausted and even as they anticipate the pain that will assault their joints and muscles in a matter of hours?
Then go to the Chargers locker room after a victory in which the team rushed 35 times for 150 yards.
"It makes it a lot easier when you can sit there and grind," center Matt Slauson said. "Football is a very intense sport. There's a lot of chess that goes into it. But when you break it down, football is just football."
The Chargers offensive linemen love their quarterback, appreciate his leadership and ability to carve up defenses with his mind and arm. But they would rather take the ball out of his hands and the gorilla off his back.
Philip Rivers has led 21 fourth-quarter comebacks to victory, seventh-most among active quarterbacks and 20th all time. His 90.4 fourth-quarter passer rating is ninth all time.
He has played some games where his teammates and coaches wonder how he didn't black out. There are plays after which coaches will ask him, "How did you do that?" He's that good.
He can carry a team to victory.
But the Chargers wish he wasn't asked to do so as much as he has been.
"Michael Jordan was a really good basketball player, but it's not like every game was on his shoulders," right tackle Joe Barksdale said this week. "It's a team. Teams are most effective when good team football is being played."
To which Rivers would say, "Amen."
(In honor of the theme, this column will contain no quotes from Rivers. His folksy insight generally makes columns better, for sure, but we don't need to rely on that all the time.)
Jordan, in fact, missed 26 of the 56 game-winning shots he attempted in a game's final five seconds.
And there have been 28 times when Rivers had the opportunity to lead a game-winning or game-tying drive at the end of the fourth quarter and failed.
So many of those games were close because of Rivers' high level of play. The Chargers since 2010 have had more one-score defeats (33) than any other NFL team except Cleveland (also 33). Without Rivers, many of those games wouldn't even have been competitive by the fourth quarter.
But the bottom line is he couldn't get it done. Not by himself.
"When you look at Philip early in his career, when he had LaDainian (Tomlinson) and that stud O-line, they won a lot of games," Slauson said. "Philip is one of those guys you can put it on and say, 'Go win it for us,' and he definitely can. But why have him have to that when you have a very capable offensive line and a stable of horses over there ready to run? Put it on them."
Slauson, signed as a free agent this offseason, is a good student of Chargers history. The four seasons in which Rivers played with Tomlinson (and/or Michael Turner and Darren Sproles) were all playoff seasons. In those 64 regular-season games, Rivers threw 24 or fewer passes 17 times (16 victories). In his 98 games since, he has thrown 24 or fewer passes just 11 times (nine victories).
Relying more on the line and running back Melvin Gordon is what the Chargers did last week against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Gordon had a career-high 24 carries for 102 yards. Rivers completed 17 of his 24 passes for 220 yards and four touchdowns for a concisely efficient 138.9 rating.
It's a game plan that should have been followed more stubbornly against Kansas City in the season opener and an attack that will likely have to be implemented more often as the season progresses sans Keenan Allen and Danny Woodhead.
The Chargers maintain they ran adequately against the Chiefs. And they did total 155 rushing yards, five more than against the Chiefs. But their 32 rushes in Kansas City accounted for just 46 percent of their plays, while they ran 56 percent of the time against Jacksonville.
The scoring margin doesn't account for the entirety of the increase. The Chargers led by 21 points midway through the third quarter in Kansas City and by 28 at the same point against the Jaguars. The Chargers began the second game with six runs on an eight-play touchdown drive. And after never rushing more than two plays in a row against the Chiefs, the Chargers ran three consecutive plays four times and once rushed four times in a row against Jacksonville.
It was a mindset.
Three times in the fourth quarter in Kansas City, Gordon ran for two yards early in a series and then didn't run again that possession. A short run did not deter the Chargers from going back to the run against the Jaguars.
As a result, Gordon and the line got in a rhythm.
When given the opportunity to run and run and run, essentially every offensive line since the beginning of football begins to build off its own brute force. The linemen get juiced by the regularity of taking the beating to their opponent across the line of scrimmage. The running back, buoyed by confidence, is more decisive and feels it being easier to work through tackles. Of Gordon's 102 yards, 52 came after the first time he was hit.
"It kind of reminded you how fun football can be if you're doing it the right way," guard Orlando Franklin said of the joy he and his line mates felt during and after the Jacksonville beatdown.
There's another component of this _ actually being able to work together.
With the exception of Slauson, this is the same projected starting line as 2015. But injuries limited that group to just 61 snaps as a group. They're healthy so far this season after taking virtually every snap together in offseason practices, as opposed to the mix-and-match philosophy of former line coach Joe D'Alessandris.
"This offensive line hasn't changed since (spring workouts) started," Franklin said. "That's a big difference."
There are subtle changes in technique and the way they're asked to block as well. And, still, they were lacking on plenty of plays. In particular, a number of combination blocks were not clean.
The biggest differences are Gordon's assertiveness and the way new coordinator Ken Whisenhunt is calling plays.
It will continue.
The Chargers ran at least 35 times in a game four times the past two seasons under Frank Reich. In 2013, when Whisenhunt was calling plays, they did so seven times.
It's a winning formula. And it makes the linemen better and happy.
