In the eyes of many, the Los Angeles Chargers have officially broken Justin Herbert.
And from an outside perspective, it's easy to see why that might be the assumption. After back-to-back years being constantly pressured behind one of the worst offensive lines in the league, Herbert now looks completely out of sorts—trying to fit ball into non-existent windows and seeming discombobulated and out of rhythm on seemingly every offensive snap.
The on-field product also has a lot to do with it, obviously. He's playing the worst football of his career this season, having posted 1,591 passing yards for six touchdowns and a league-leading 11 interceptions across Los Angeles' first eight games. The Chargers, needless to say, do not have a single win in that span.
And yet the organization still has faith in Herbert to be the quarterback that can turn things around. They proved that at the deadline when they shut down a desperate call from the Minnesota Vikings inquiring about his availability, and they'll prove it again this offseason when they (hopefully) reconstruct the roster and scheme around his strengths.
There's truly no defending how Herbert has played so far this season—but this year is already essentially over. It's time to start looking toward 2027 and beyond, and there's no reason to be fully dismissive of Herbert's ability to be the one to right this ship.
Justin Herbert is the right quarterback for the Chargers—and any path forward for this team has to involve him
Again, Herbert has been the worst quarterback in the league this season. And elite quarterbacks, even in truly dismal situations, often figure out how to make things work. It's hard to see, right now, how Herbert could still be in the argument for any sort of 'elite' status on a league-wide scale.
But there's only a small handful of those quarterbacks league-wide—in fact, you could probably count them on one hand. What a quarterback is meant to do, at least one that's worthy of Super Bowl contention, is to take a good situation and elevate it into greatness—or, in some cases, to take a mediocre situation and elevate it into a playoff win.
FanSided's recent QB rankings—compiled by averaging the ratings from 50 experts across the network—had Herbert ranked 17th in the NFL, not just based on his performance to this point in the season but based on expectations moving forward. Obviously, that's not close to the 5-8 range most people would've had him in prior to the start of the season—and he dropped 10 spots from when the experts did this same poll before Week 1.
Now, this is relatively meaningless when it comes to Herbert. It's largely meant to measure performance in 2026 against a career-long sample, and as I argued in my paragraph on Herbert for the rankings, trying to evaluate his game right now is a futile endeavor. There's simply too much wrong with this offense and this scheme to get a true feel for what's truly gone wrong with Herbert as a player.
But if you strip away the muck and mire of this season, here are the facts. Despite having abysmal protection under Greg Roman, Herbert excelled on out-of-structure plays, clawing the Chargers to 11 wins and a Wild Card berth in back-to-back campaigns. Over his first six NFL seasons, even with a drop in pure passing production, he still posted an interception rate of just 1.7%—which would put him fourth all time (ahead of Tom Brady) if things didn't go completely awry this season. He's got one of the most accurate deep throws in the league, and his scrambling ability is just short of what the most elite quarterbacks in that category are capable of accomplishing.
What the Chargers must learn from this campaign is that Herbert isn't the type of quarterback that can just be thrust into any system and be expected to succeed. Not many quarterbacks are. McDaniel altered too much of his game, without the right talent around him, to expect immediate success.
But with the right combination of alterations this offseason, it's entirely reasonable to think we can see Herbert find the form we saw over the past few seasons. That easily makes him much better than the 17th-best quarterback in the NFL—and you don't ship out a quarterback of that caliber for draft picks unless you have absolutely no choice.
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