Joe Hortiz stood in front of reporters Thursday in El Segundo and said the thing every losing team's general manager eventually has to say out loud: nobody called with an offer good enough to change anything.
The Los Angeles Chargers are 0-8. They are the only winless team left in the league, carrying an 11-game losing streak that stretches back into last season's playoffs. And heading into Tuesday's trade deadline, the obvious question around the building was whether a front office sitting on that kind of record would start selling pieces for future value. Hortiz's answer, delivered plainly, was that he tried. Nobody bit hard enough.
what joe hortiz said about the trade deadline
"I've been on the phone since Week 3 talking to teams," Hortiz said. "They've inquired about players' availabilities. I've said, 'Hey, this player, no, we're not trading.' Would we consider something? Yes, but it would have to be a good package for us to move them. No one put together any packages that blew us away or that inspired us to continue."
That's the quote that matters here, and it's worth sitting with for a second. A GM on an 0-8 team saying no good packages came in isn't spin, necessarily. It's a GM telling you the league, collectively, didn't think his roster had enough sellable value to justify giving up real draft capital for it. That's its own kind of diagnosis, whether or not Hortiz meant it that way.
He was specific about who wasn't available at any price. "I'm not trading Justin (Herbert), right? No one ever called on Justin, but I'm not trading Justin. I'm not trading Ladd (McConkey). I'm not trading Joe (Alt). I'm not trading Derwin (James Jr.). It's just not happening. Tarheeb Still, these players that have futures with us." The framing was deliberate. This is a GM drawing a line between the pieces of a true rebuild and the furniture that just needs better football around it.
why the daiyan henley trade fell through
The one deal that got close enough to have a name attached was linebacker Daiyan Henley to the Denver Broncos, and it got rescinded before it ever became final. Hortiz didn't elaborate on why it unwound, and the reporting doesn't give us the mechanics of the reversal, so I won't guess at them here. What we do know: Henley is still on the roster, still expected to play when the Chargers face Baltimore, and the trade that briefly existed never happened. Everything else Hortiz described as calls that never got "particularly serious." Teams asking availability, not teams building offers.
how bad has the los angeles chargers season been
Here's the part of the story that makes Hortiz's optimism, "I feel like we can win this year. I really do," land as either stubborn faith or willful denial, depending on how generous you're feeling.
| Category | Chargers 2026 | League rank |
|---|---|---|
| Record | 0-8 | last |
| Points per game (since McDaniel hired as OC) | 15.1 | last |
| Herbert total QBR | lowest among qualified passers | last |
| Herbert TD-INT | 6 TD, 11 INT | n/a |
| Points allowed per game | 27.4 | 28th |
That's not a team missing on one side of the ball. That's a near-complete collapse, offense and defense both bottom-quartile, and a franchise quarterback throwing nearly twice as many interceptions as touchdowns in an offense built around him and a new coordinator. Mike McDaniel came over to fix exactly this kind of stall. So far, the stall won.
The arc hurts worse because of where this team just was. Under Jim Harbaugh, the Chargers made back-to-back playoff appearances. Now the losing streak, including those playoff games, sits at eleven straight. checked the almanac on winless seasons: the 2008 Detroit Lions remain the modern floor, 0-16, the full schedule gone without a win. The Chargers aren't within shouting distance of that kind of historical infamy, and with eight games still on the schedule and Herbert still the starter, they have plenty of runway to stay off that list entirely. But the 0-8 start puts them in rare company for a team that was in the playoffs within recent memory, and that's the part Hortiz has to manage, not just this year's record, but the gap between what this roster did eighteen months ago and what it's doing now.
what comes next for the chargers
The Chargers will carry the same roster they had ahead of the deadline into "Monday Night Football" against the Ravens, who sit at 4-5. Henley, despite the brief detour through trade paperwork, is expected to play. For Baltimore, a team with its own uneven season, it's a chance to pad a record against a club still searching for its first win. For Los Angeles, it's just the next opportunity, and given how this season has gone, that's about all Hortiz and this locker room have left to hang their optimism on.
Hortiz's closing comments were really about next year wearing this year's uniform. "Our job is to continue to fight this year," he said. "But also have a team that we feel that we can go out there and be successful in the future, too. And so to sit here and say, 'Oh, we're having a bad year. We should get rid of anybody,' that just doesn't seem like a smart way to build for the future as well. So you got to look at it this year and in the future."
That's the real thesis of the deadline that wasn't. Hortiz isn't holding Herbert, McConkey, Alt, James and Still because the offers weren't big enough. He's holding them because he still believes they're the core of the next good Chargers team, whenever that team shows up. Whether that belief gets rewarded starts getting tested against Baltimore, and it doesn't get easier from there. An 0-8 team searching for its first win carries a different kind of pressure than a rebuilding one; every week without a result in the column adds weight to Hortiz's words, not just about this roster's ceiling, but about how much runway ownership gives him and this staff to prove the faith wasn't misplaced.