Not very Brady, but still 18-0

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Warm and fuzzy?

The San Diego Chargers were cold and silly.

Gritty and brave?

The San Diego Chargers were tepid and boneheaded.

Our Southern California neighbors walked out of Gillette Stadium on Sunday proud to have finished within a whisker of the undefeated New England Patriots in a 21-12 loss in the AFC championship game.

Dudes, get real.

You could have won. You should have won.

You had the crowd quietly shivering. You had the Patriots oddly backpedaling.

Tom Brady was confused. Randy Moss was lost. The old linebackers were creaking. The poorly dressed coach was grumbling.

The Chargers were one of the few teams during the last five months to have a serious chance at beating the unbeatable.

But instead of going for it, they retreated from it.

Instead of flying, they froze, and today the organization remains typically perched on the edge of ordinary.

“We had them, we had them,” said Chargers safety Marlon McCree, shaking his head. “We had their number all game.”

They had them with a multifaceted offense that spread the Patriots’ defense and had the opportunity to make big plays.

But it’s hard to make those plays with a quarterback who is trying to elude 11 athletes on one leg.

And it’s hard to make those plays when your coach pulls the offense off the field six yards from the end zone with a chance to take the lead in the middle of the third quarter.

And it’s impossible to make those plays when your coach hands the ball to the best offense in league history with 9:13 left in the game, and the Patriots never give it back.

Brady throws three passes for interceptions, Moss makes one catch, the Chargers out-gain the Patriots until their final drive, and yet they still lose by nine?

“It’s a joke for anyone to think we didn’t have a legitimate chance to win this game,” said Chargers defensive end Luis Castillo. “We gave them everything we had, and they know it.”

Not quite.

New York Giants, take heed for the Super Bowl.

Giving the Patriots everything you have means giving them every inch of your bench, every page in your playbook, and every bit of your fears.

On Sunday, it should have meant giving them Billy Volek.

Despite what everyone will say today about the courage of torn-kneed Charger quarterback Philip Rivers, more relevant is the foolishness of the Chargers Coach Norv Turner for playing him.

Rivers completed barely half of his passes. He threw two passes for interceptions and none for touchdowns. He had a passer rating of 46.1.

If backup Volek was good enough to lead the Chargers on a game-winning drive against Indianapolis last week, why wasn’t he good enough to follow it up here?

If Rivers could have avoided the rush for a split second longer, he might have completed several more passes. But with the rush collapsing around his noticeable limp, he often had no chance.

Because receivers Chris Chambers and Vincent Jackson were consistently getting open, Volek would have given them a chance.

San Diego folks today will marvel at Rivers’ resilience. But with the Chargers trailing by two points late in the third quarter, Rivers completed only three of his final eight passes, most of them short or wide.

“You can’t ask for anything more than he gave,” said Turner of Rivers. “I couldn’t have gotten him off there if I wanted to.”

Um, yes he could. He’s the coach.

Turner played it just as safe on his calls, particularly in that third quarter, when the Chargers were trailing by five points and facing fourth and three from the Patriots’ six-yard line.

Instead of going for a touchdown that could have given them the lead, they kicked a field goal that kept the Patriots in control.

“I wanted to go for it; I wanted one more shot at it,” said running back Michael Turner, who was replacing injured LaDainian Tomlinson.

If you don’t think the Patriots were relieved at not being passed on the scoreboard, listen to Brady afterward.

“We always had the lead [after the first quarter], and the mentality is that when you’re always winning, you just don’t feel like you need to press when you go out there,” the quarterback said.

Turner made it easier on the Patriots again in the fourth quarter: When facing fourth and 10 on the Patriots’ 36 while trailing by nine, he handed the ball back to them on a punt.

“It’s a hard decision, but we’ve been playing good defense,” Turner said.

The Giants, take heed. The best Super Bowl defense against the Patriots will be an attitude of offense.

When in doubt, go for it. When a risk might work, risk it. If you worry about failing, the Patriots will sense it, and you will most certainly fail.

New England does seemingly everything right, so you must take every chance to do something better.

Take a Patriots punt in the second quarter. The ball was tipped away from the goal line by a flying receiver named Kelley Washington, the Chargers started their drive on the four-yard line, and five plays later Rivers threw a pass for an interception that led to a Patriots touchdown.

Turner called the interception the most important play of the game. And it was all started by some guy hustling down on the punt team.

He even did a downing-the-ball dance, and how often do you see that?

“Plays like that are game-changing plays,” Washington said.

New England does all that stuff all the time, sometimes during the same drive, such as that final drive Sunday, when Kevin Faulk made a diving catch on one third-down play, then grabbed the ball from behind him to convert another third down.

“We played well enough to win the game,” said Faulk, who, like most of his Patriots teammates, is purposely one of the dullest quotes in NFL history.

The Chargers talk more. They strut more. During what could have been the most important win in franchise history, they started better.

But they didn’t dare to finish. And now they are finished, left with only the memories of a needlessly gutsy quarterback and a wrongly conservative coach, consoled with a defeat that should be no consolation.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.