Not long after Jim Harbaugh was hired in January to coach the Los Angeles Chargers at a handsome $16m per season, he picked out the stalwarts on his roster. Stalwarts is not a typical football term, but Harbaugh loves stalwarts – those who are truly committed to the cause.

The Chargers were coming off a 5-12 season in which head coach Brandon Staley was fired with three games to play, so it would figure that the quirky Harbaugh’s stalwart safari would not be too fruitful. But he found maybe 15 stalwarts, and there would be a great place to start.

“And it’s grown since then,” Harbaugh said of all of his stalwarts at a news conference Saturday, after the Chargers (10-6) clinched an AFC playoff berth with a 40-7 victory at New England.

Harbaugh, the 61-year-old former NFL quarterback, has been exceptional at turning around football teams, from the University of San Diego to Stanford University to the San Francisco 49ers to the University of Michigan, the undefeated national champions of college last year.

The Chargers would be a tough challenge. In the 10 seasons prior to his arrival, they’d been in only three playoff games, two of which they lost. The team had moved to Los Angeles in 2017 from San Diego, where they’d built a fan base – a stalwart fan base – over 56 seasons.

The Chargers play in the beautiful SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, but they share the facility with the Rams, who are also their landlords and who started playing in LA in 1946 (though they were in St Louis for 21 years). The Chargers don’t tend to drive NFL conversation.

Those things did not matter to Harbaugh. For one, he had a very good quarterback, Justin Herbert. After the Chargers got Harbaugh, they hired Joe Hortiz from Baltimore as general manager, then Greg Roman, Harbaugh’s old pal, as offensive coordinator.

The Chargers were 2-2 at their bye week but won five of their next six games, winning their last two games after they’d lost three of four. Harbaugh, a hard-nosed coach’s son who likes hard-nosed football, has been delighted with the team’s attitude.

“There’s no coach who could have it better than coaching these players,” he said Saturday.

“Nobody,” he added, before thinking about that for a second or two, then saying, “Maybe. The only one would be the future us [who] could have it better than us.”

Harbaugh laughed at the way that sounded. As notable as his first season with the Chargers has already been, they all claim still to have things to work on. Harbaugh tries to downplay his role – “very little to do with me,” he said – but, with Hortiz’s help, Harbaugh forged a talented, not to mention formidable, team.

Referring to Harbaugh and Hortiz, Herbert said, “They have done such a great job of getting the right guys here. You look in the locker room, and everybody plays for each other.”

Herbert called Harbaugh “a competitor, and he wants to win no matter what it is. It definitely shows, and it’s the way everyone fights for him, wants to play for him, and respects him.” Harbaugh called such teamwork “a powerful thing”.

Herbert, the five-year veteran from Oregon, was considered among the NFL’s elite quarterbacks, especially after he led the Chargers to a 10-7 record and the playoffs two years ago. But his 2023 season ended four games early and in rather ignominious fashion: he broke his finger while trying to make a tackle after throwing an interception.

Herbert has had a splendid season, with 21 touchdown passes against three interceptions and a 99.9 quarterback rating. The Chargers bulked up their offensive line and added a productive free-agent running back, JK Dobbins, who was hardly used in Baltimore. Rookie receiver Ladd McConkey, a second-round pick from Georgia, has 77 catches for 1,054 yards.

Khalil Mack, the ravaging and punishing 33-year-old linebacker (not to mention one of Harbaugh’s stalwarts), returned for a third season to anchor LA’s defense, which is the hardest to score against in the NFL, giving up a mere 17.6 points per game.

“I feel like we’ve been doing it the right way all along, and we’re starting to see results from the work we’ve been putting in,” Chargers safety Derwin James Jr said. “We know a new season is just beginning. We’re not settling with just being in the playoffs. We know where we want to be, what type of team we want to be. Man, we want to just keep going.”

The Chargers have lost twice to NFL royalty, the Kansas City Chiefs, albeit by nine points total. Six of the Chargers’ 10 victories have come against opponents who have been eliminated from playoff contention. A 40-17 loss on 15 December to Tampa Bay was a low point.

But Harbaugh has become the fifth coach in NFL history to win 10 games in his first season with two teams – the eighth coach in NFL history to make the playoffs in his first season with two teams. (The 49ers were 13-3 and made the NFC Championship Game in 2011.)

Harbaugh said Saturday, pointing upwards, that “the hand of God” was on the Chargers, but this has been, he added, a team effort. He pledged that they will keep grinding. They might just end up playing Baltimore, coached by his older brother, John, in the playoffs. That would be a delightful, juicy repeat coaching matchup of Super Bowl XLVII, won by the Ravens.

This has not been a carefree season for him. Harbaugh experienced an irregular heartbeat in an October game against Denver, missing some plays in the first quarter. He said he would drink less Diet Coke, but he also said football is a tonic that keeps him feeling young.

That seems like a good thing, because Jim Harbaugh’s hefty contract still has four more years to run. He pushes forward, but Part One was identifying some stalwarts on last year’s team, the bedrock for the “future us”.

“It’s been their leadership that has motivated us, kept us going,” he said.

“And also,” he added, “it’s the antidote for complacency.”