National Football League

Chargers' Joey Bosa praises 'really genuine' Jim Harbaugh after first meeting

Published Feb. 26, 2024 5:22 p.m. ET

Joey Bosa and Jim Harbaugh spent years on opposite sides of one of college football's biggest rivalries, with Bosa a star pass rusher at Ohio State and Harbaugh starting his rebuild at his alma mater Michigan. But the Los Angeles Chargers' star defensive end has nothing but praise for his new head coach after his first meeting with Harbaugh.

"Great first impressions," Bosa told the New York Post. "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."

Both Bosa and the Chargers are coming off a massively disappointing stretch. Bosa has missed large chunks of the past two seasons due to injury after being considered one of the best defensive players in the NFL during the first several years of his career. Meanwhile, a loaded Chargers roster behind young star quarterback Justin Herbert suffered an embarrassing collapse in the wild-card round of the 2022-23 playoffs before falling to a 5-12 record this past season that resulted in the firings of head coach Brandon Staley and general manager Tom Telesco.

That paved the way for the team to hire Harbaugh, the former Chargers quarterback who capped off his nine-year run at Michigan by leading the Wolverines to a 15-0 season in 2023 that culminated in the team's first national title since 1997.

Bosa is expecting brighter days under Harbaugh, but he's not willing to get ahead of himself after seeing how past seasons that began with Super Bowl expectations have turned out.

"I’d like to win Game 1 first, then we can talk about Week 2 and then Week 3," Bosa added. "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.

"There’s a lot of talk of Super Bowl every year, and every year I kind of have a similar answer, like, ‘All right, let’s see how the first week goes and then we’ll talk about that.'"

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