Bolts From The Blue
The 2025 Chargers are hoping that their upcoming season ends more positively than 2024’s did. Here are three Secret Superstars who can help Jim Harbaugh’s team on its way.
If you evaluate draft prospects long enough, you’re going to have swings and misses along the way.
I regret to inform you up front that Oregon quarterback Justin Herbert was one of my Vlad Guerrero-level swings, with far less positive impact. Herbert’s traits were obvious, but as he was in an offense that I thought should have been locked in a shed and set on fire, it was tough to tell how those traits would transfer to the NFL. When you see a 6’6, 236-pound rocket-armed guy missing screen passes wildly, and making the most of his deep-ball opportunities when he had them (which wasn’t nearly enough), you can be distracted when you play too much attention to the scheme, and not enough to isolating the player regardless of his environment.
Which proved to be a valuable lesson for me.
That said, five years into Herbert’s NFL career, are we still waiting for the quarterback his most ardent supporters hope to eventually see? Not that Herbert’s 2024 season, his first under head coach Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman, was bad for the most part — in the regular season, he completed 332 of 504 passes for 3,870 yards, 23 touchdowns, three interceptions, and a passer rating of 101.7 — the first time Herbert broke 100 in his NFL career.
Then, of course, came the 32-12 loss to the Houston Texans in the Wild Card round, when Herbert (who had the NFL’s lowest interception rate in the regular season at 0.6%) threw four picks in his worst game to date.
Harbaugh blamed the protection, which didn’t hold up well against Houston’s ravenous pass rush, after the fact. Herbert blamed himself, as all great quarterbacks do, whether it’s true or not.
The only thing you can do after something like that is to look forward.
“Just like every other loss,” Herbert said in June of that disaster. “You take a look on what you did wrong, what you did right and try to improve. If I spend any more time on worrying or focusing on a loss like that, I think I’m doing a disservice on my teammates. Obviously, it didn’t go the way we wanted to, like I said at the end of the year, but you’ve got to move on and take a look at what you did wrong. Be honest with yourself, be critical, but you can’t let it take up too much of your time.”
The time is now for Herbert and the Chargers to take the proverbial next step. If they’re to do so, they’ll need help from a full roster that has been assembled to perform at a championship level. It’s the second time in his professional career that Herbert has had the same offensive coordinator two years in a row — he also had...
