How a grueling cancer battle taught Brandon Staley he can overcome Jacksonville fiasco

The losses were dramatic, certainly, even historic, the Chargers' last two seasons ending in ways difficult to conceive.

But Brandon Staley is one who can relate, can relate to being repeatedly crushed, to being finished in both mind and body. Can relate to the pain of progress.

He's a fighter who, still today, summons the competitive acid that swells inside a gut trying to accept losses suffered on an AAU hoops court as a 12-year-old.

And he's a son, too, a son who watched his mother somehow cut daylight through the impossible — a winding, gnarled cancer battle that he'd eventually have to face himself.

"Because of the tough losses, the endings to the past two seasons, you're closer to the right path," Staley said. "It's exactly what my mom used to always say to us."

Linda Staley's message has shaped his life. Her words are, as Staley explained it, "what drive me from these experiences."

He used them years ago when Hodgkin lymphoma invaded his chest and demanded a response to a regimen that gives life and hope but takes so much else.

"Every one of those chemo treatments was like a football game to him," Jason, Staley's twin brother, remembered. "It was going to be a grind … and he was going to grind the cancer right out of him."

So now, Staley is in another fight — one that isn't life or death just a whole lot of life, his life. For the