Alexander: Chargers ‘superhero’ Justin Herbert sets the tone
INGLEWOOD — There are few adjectives that Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh will spare in talking about Justin Herbert, especially in the aftermath of a week in which the quarterback treated hand surgery as a minor inconvenience.
“He’s a superhero,” Harbaugh said Monday night after Herbert guided his team to a 22-19 overtime victory over Philadelphia. “He’s a competitive maniac. He was even stiff-arming guys with a broken hand, and he had surgery a week ago (and was) out here tonight. It felt like we were in a movie where the quarterback’s doing these things and you get to a point where you go, ‘OK, this is getting a little unrealistic,’ you know? That’s what it felt like to me.
“He refuses to lose (and) he’s as tough as they get. He’s a superhero quarterback.”
Then again, it’s probably wise to keep Harbaugh’s gushing in perspective. Asked his feelings after the Chargers’ win over the defending Super Bowl champs, he said, “I’d put it in the discussion of the birth of my seven children, my marriage, you know? In the conversation. Just joyful, joyous and the Biblical definition of that is just overflowing with joy.”
And, remember, after his Michigan team beat Alabama in the 2024 Rose Bowl to reach the College Football Playoff championship game, Harbaugh called quarterback J.J. McCarthy “the greatest quarterback in University of Michigan football – college football history.” (He did acknowledge that Tom Brady went on to have a pretty good NFL career.)
Still, don’t let the superlatives distract from the main point: In a sport where the guy who plays the most exacting skill position also has to demonstrate his toughness as a function of leadership, Herbert is a match for any NFL quarterback in terms of setting an example in the locker room.
The current exhibit A: Herbert played Monday night a week after surgery to fix a fractured finger on his left hand, suffered the previous week against Las Vegas. It obviously didn’t affect his throwing, since he’s right-handed, but other aspects of the position – handing the ball off, say, or just taking the snap from under center – were and are impacted.
And while Herbert began most of the Chargers’ offensive plays in the shotgun Monday night, he wasn’t afraid to go under center. Of their 74 plays, 23 of them involved that direct snap, forcing him to handle the ball with his bad hand.
He did so stoically.
“Just like any other week of going out there and getting the job done,” Herbert said. “We took a couple snaps yesterday and today and felt like it was good to go, so it was part of the game plan.”
It wasn’t his best game by any stretch – a 59.6 quarterback rating on 12-for-26 passing and 139 yards, 60 of those coming on a first-quarter dumpoff to Kimani Vidal that the running back took down the sideline before being pushed out of bounds at the Eagles’ 17 to set up the Chargers’ only touchdown.
Herbert was sacked seven times, fumbled twice and lost one of them (on a first-and-10 at the Eagles’ 30) and threw an interception. None of that should be surprising, since the injury-ravaged Chargers’ offensive line has been just hanging on for, well, weeks.
And maybe that lends even more perspective to what Herbert is accomplishing, leading his team to a 9-4 record and, right now, the No. 5 spot in the AFC playoff picture.
He took all of those snaps under center that had to hurt. He actually stiff-armed a defender on one play with that bad hand encased in a soft cast. And when one thing wasn’t working, he went to another; with 66 yards in 10 runs, he was the Chargers’ leading rusher.
Most of those were on scrambles when the protection broke down. But two were bigger than the others: A third-and-4 scramble for a first down to the Philadelphia 38 inside the final minute, and a 9-yard dash over right guard off a fake to Vidal to get the ball to the Eagles’ 29 and set up Cameron Dicker’s overtime-forcing field goal with 12 seconds left.
“The pain tolerance he has is off the charts,” Harbaugh said. “I asked him a couple times during the week how it was feeling and he would say, ‘It was better today than yesterday,’ and that’s what we were going for – better tomorrow than today. Later in the week it was: How is he? How’s the pain? When he took a snap, he took it real light.”
And when asked how it felt, Harbaugh said Herbert told him: “The pain of that was nothing compared to the mental pain.” In other words, when he didn’t practice Wednesday, that killed him.
Yeah, his teammates have to notice, both the ordeal and the stoicism with which he handles it. Herbert seems to understand that his example to the group means as much as his performance.
“Honestly, I just think about the guys in that locker room,” Herbert said. “They’d do it for us. There have been multiple guys. (Linebacker) Troy Dye and (DB) Elijah Molden both broke their hands, and I think that they were playing the next week too. They probably don’t get enough credit for that. Just because I’m the quarterback, I get the talk about that, but those guys, they battle.
“There’s definitely guys in that locker room that are fighting through so many different injuries and things worse than what I’m going through, so it’s the least that I can do to show up and give my best.”
The payoff, of course, is down the road. The Chargers have four regular-season games left: At struggling Kansas City (who imagined those words being written by this point) on Sunday, at Dallas on Dec. 21, at home against Houston the following week (probably Dec. 27, though it’s still TBA), and at AFC-leading Denver the final weekend.
“The motto is, what type of team do you wanna be in January and February?” linebacker Daiyan Henley said. “You gotta show that in December. So right there what you’ve seen was a team that’s trying to show what type of team we’re gonna be moving forward into the postseason. … We gotta move forward and every game is a playoff game, so that’s one and we got a lot more to come.”
For this team, and particularly this quarterback, the postseason is the next frontier.
jalexander@scng.com