The Chargers were dealt a tough blow last week, when starting center and notable free agent addition Tyler Biadasz suffered a knee injury that will sideline him for all of 2026. However, Los Angeles finally received some good news on the injury front, as the club welcomed left tackle Rashawn Slater back to practice on Saturday (h/t Josh Alper of Pro Football Talk).
Slater sustained a torn patellar tendon last August, which kept him out for the entire 2025 season and which played a key role in the Chargers’ poor O-line performance. Although he was cleared for this summer’s training camp as expected, Slater left the team’s first padded practice early, and after a light workout the following day, he was held out for the next couple of weeks (via Ryan Anderson of the California Post).
Slater’s presence allows 2024 first-rounder Joe Alt – who missed 11 games with an injury of his own last season after opening the campaign as Slater’s LT replacement – to return to the right tackle slot. That development, along with the Biadasz acquisition, was expected to kick the Bolts’ OL into gear.
Losing Biadasz is obviously a difficult pill to swallow, but having a Pro Bowl-caliber tackle protecting Justin Herbert’s blind side should go a long way towards improving on the 54 sacks Herbert took last season. Those 54 takedowns represented the second-worst figure in the league, and while the Chargers nonetheless amassed 11 wins and advanced to the postseason, Herbert was victimized in a wildcard-round loss to the Patriots. New England sacked Herbert six times and hit him 11 times en route to a 16-3 victory.
As Anderson notes, Slater has allowed just nine sacks and 17 hurries over the course of 1,339 pass-blocking snaps in his career. He has consistently drawn rave reviews from Pro Football Focus, which considered him the second-best tackle in the league out of 81 qualified players in 2024. That performance was enough for the Chargers to authorize a four-year, $114MM extension for Slater last July.
The Northwestern product suffered the patellar injury less than two weeks after putting pen to paper, but the Chargers have reason to hope they will realize some return on their investment a year after making it. The club will likely be inserting second-round rookie Jake Slaughter into Biadasz’s vacant post at the pivot, making Slater’s return even more critical.