1960 Los Angeles Chargers season
inaugural season for the franchise in Los Angeles
The 1960 Los Angeles Chargers season was the team's inaugural season and also the inaugural season of the American Football League (AFL). Head coach Sid Gillman led the Chargers to the AFL Western Division title with a 10–4 record, winning eight games out of nine after a 2–3 start, and qualifying to play the Houston Oilers in the AFL championship game.
The Chargers had the right to host the championship game at their home venue, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. However, as the team's attendance for home games was falling below 10,000, league and television officials feared showing empty seats in the 100,000+ seat Coliseum, and they persuaded the Chargers to give up the advantage. The game was moved to Houston's Jeppesen Stadium. The teams had split their two games in the regular season, with the home teams winning, and the host Oilers were 6½-point favorites to win the title. Down by a point after three quarters, the Chargers gave up an 88-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter and lost, 24–16.
The Chargers' poor attendance figures, due in part to heavy competition from the Los Angeles Rams, soon led to speculation that they might leave Los Angeles. In December, owner Barron Hilton denied that he was planning a move, but in late January he relocated the Chargers down the coast to Balboa Stadium in San Diego for the 1961 season. The team would not return to Los Angeles until 2017 where they would temporarily stay at Dignity Health Sports Park in the suburb of Carson for three seasons until they moved to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood with the Rams in 2020.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1960 Los Angeles Chargers season” is inaugural season for the franchise in Los Angeles. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Angeles, Chargers and season, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2879193. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1961, 2017 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “1960 Los Angeles Chargers season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.