Earl Faison showed up in San Diego as a first-round pick in 1961 after an All-American career at Indiana, and he wasted no time making noise. At 6-foot-5 and around 260 pounds, he was big, strong, and surprisingly quick for the era. He won AFL Rookie of the Year and First-Team All-Pro honors right away, batting down passes, stuffing runs, and giving quarterbacks fits. Sid Gillman and the coaches loved him—Gillman later said there hadn’t been many better.

He spent the next several years as a key piece of the original Fearsome Foursome defensive line alongside guys like Ernie Ladd. The group was massive and disruptive, and Faison was the explosive end who could fight through double-teams and still get to the quarterback. He was an AFL All-Star in each of his five full seasons with the Chargers and earned First-Team All-Pro honors in four. In 1963, the defense helped the Chargers win the AFL Championship, and Faison was even named the defensive MVP of the All-Star Game that year. He also snagged five interceptions in San Diego and returned two for touchdowns—pretty rare for a defensive end.

Back trouble and contract issues piled up, and early in 1966 the Chargers traded him to the Houston Oilers. Across those five-plus seasons in San Diego he racked up roughly 30 unofficial sacks and those five interceptions, numbers that reflected a consistently disruptive presence on one of the AFL’s better defensive fronts.

The franchise later inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1986, a fitting nod to the big, disruptive defensive end who had helped set the tone for those early Chargers teams.

Eric Weddle landed in San Diego as a second-round pick out of Utah in 2007, and it took him a minute to settle in. He didn’t start as a rookie, playing mostly in nickel packages and on special teams, but by 2008 he was the full-time free safety and immediately looked like he belonged. That year he piled up a career-high 127 combined tackles and returned a fumble 86 yards for a touchdown, the kind of play that made it clear the Chargers had found a guy who could cover ground, hit, and occasionally change a game with one big moment.

Things really clicked in 2011 after the Chargers locked him up with a five-year, $40 million deal. Weddle led the NFL with seven interceptions, earned his first Pro Bowl nod, and made First-Team All-Pro while also getting named the Chargers’ Defensive Player of the Year. He had a couple of late-game picks that sealed early wins—one of them a fourth-quarter interception against the Chiefs that ended a potential game-winning drive after he diagnosed a screen and jumped the route—and he even grabbed two more in the Pro Bowl itself. From there he kept stacking solid seasons: two more Pro Bowls in 2013 and 2014, both of them 100-tackle years (115 in 2013, 114 in 2014), plus another First-Team All-Pro in 2014. He wasn’t flashy like some of the big-name safeties, but he was smart, rangy, and reliable—the guy who rarely got beat deep, always seemed to be around the ball, and made the whole secondary look more organized by calling things out and covering a ton of ground.

Weddle left the Chargers after the 2015 season and signed with the Baltimore Ravens. Across nine years in San Diego he had turned into one of the steadiest defensive backs the franchise had seen, finishing his Chargers run with 19 interceptions and more than 850 tackles while starting 122 games.

Later he was named to the 2010s All-Decade Team, a nice cap on a Chargers stretch that had produced three Pro Bowls and two First-Team All-Pro seasons.

Kris Dielman showed up in San Diego in 2003 as an undrafted free agent out of Indiana and somehow stuck around. The Chargers signed him, cut him at the end of camp, then brought him back to the practice squad. With six games left, they called him up as a reserve, and he spent the next year mostly on the bench before the team finally handed him the starting left-guard job in 2005.

Once he got the job, he played like he had something to prove. Teammates called him the enforcer and the battering ram—the guy who loved to finish blocks and kept the scuff marks on his helmet so everyone could see how hard he hit. In 2007, he went an entire season without allowing a sack and earned the first of four straight Pro Bowls. The next two years he was even better: Second-Team All-Pro in both 2008 and 2009, with an Approximate Value of at least 15 each time, while the Chargers kept stacking division titles and LaDainian Tomlinson ran behind a line that felt like it could move anybody.

Everything changed in 2011. Dielman took a nasty shot against the Jets in Week 6, staggered around, stayed in the game anyway, then suffered a seizure on the flight home. The Chargers put him on injured reserve, and the concussion issues lingered. He retired the following spring, deciding the risk wasn’t worth it.

By the time he walked away, he had started 97 games in a Chargers uniform, earned four Pro Bowls, and left a reputation as one of the nastiest, most reliable guards the franchise had seen in years—the kind of player who made the whole line feel tougher just by lining up next to him.

Gary “Big Hands” Johnson arrived in San Diego as the eighth overall pick in the 1975 draft out of Grambling, and the nickname stuck for a reason—a junior-high coach once told him to keep his big hands off a basketball. At 6-foot-2 and around 250 pounds, he wasn’t the biggest defensive tackle, but he was strong enough to bench-press 460 pounds and quick enough to chase down plays. He made the All-Rookie team right away, then really found his footing once defensive line coach Jerry Smith arrived; by 1977 he was up to 13.5 unofficial sacks and starting to look like a problem for opposing quarterbacks.

Everything clicked in 1980. Johnson led the whole league with 17.5 sacks—still the Chargers’ single-season record—and the defense piled up a league-high 60. He teamed with Fred Dean, Louie Kelcher, and Leroy Jones on a front four that got nicknamed the Bruise Brothers, and he walked away with First-Team All-Pro honors plus the AFC Defensive Lineman of the Year award from the players. One of those sacks, which knocked Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski out of a game, was so loud that someone called Chargers owner Gene Klein and threatened Johnson’s life. He followed it up with another First-Team All-Pro season in 1981 (10 more unofficial sacks) while the Chargers stacked consecutive division titles and Johnson stacked four straight Pro Bowls from 1979 through 1982.

The Chargers shipped him to the 49ers early in the 1984 season. By the time he left, he had racked up roughly 67.5 unofficial sacks in San Diego—a franchise mark at the time—plus a couple of interceptions and a handful of fumble recoveries, all before sacks even became an official stat in 1982.

The team finally put him in the Chargers Hall of Fame in 1999, a nice nod to the guy who spent nearly a decade making life miserable for quarterbacks in the middle of the Air Coryell era.