Asked About His Job, Herbert's Answer Left No Doubts About a Future in Los Angeles
If every day were holiday, to sport would be as tedious as to work.
-Henry IV, Part I.ii.205
This is not a call for sympathy. Let's get that out of the way.
There are, without question, more deserving subjects for your sympathy than the 28-year-old millionaire quarterback who stands 6'-6", weighs 236 pounds, has a head of hair that could mog Harry Styles; one who possesses an arm so audacious that it once inspired a defensive coordinator to say: "He can throw a raspberry through a battleship".
He gets to live, work, and dine on the West Side of the most glamorous city in the union. Oh, and he is engaged to this woman.
There are people worse off. I get it.
At times this season though, he looks like he'd rather be doing something else.
Introverted, camera-shy despite his rugged good looks, Herbert has never sought the adulation that fame permits him, but after ten years of navigating life as a reluctant celebrity athlete, lately his interviews have become prickly, laconic, and morose.
It looks like he's acting in one of those old Southwest Airlines commercials. The cut-away framing the awkwardness and discomfort with the tease of an Irish Goodbye. Wanna get away?
Asked directly whether his job still held the potential for enjoyment, or if it was just work to him, Justin Herbert didn't equivocate for even a moment. His answer left no room for interpretation.
"I think I have the greatest job ever. I get paid to play football. And it is the best job in the world. I think I am the luckiest guy in the world to be able to play football in Southern California with this team and this group of guys. I love football, and doing what I do."
Perhaps unsatisfied with the answer, the question was asked if any of that passion had dimmed over his tenure in the NFL.
"No, I have the greatest job in the world."
Herbert probably doesn't enjoy a multitude of things. Sure, he can manufacture the origins of a smile; he can endure them because of his profession, one he is handsomely rewarded for, but you get the sense that he takes no pleasure in fielding questions about why he threw an interception, no glory in being the 70-foot-tall face on a billboard, and sometimes looks like he is just too educated to be subjected to the physical violence his occupation immerses him in once a week. He doesn't come across as the type of guy accustomed to having his brains rattled, nor should he be.
I think it's safe to say that we can file this under things-that-Justin-endures-as-he-tries-to-do-the-job.
When pressed about his specific thought process behind a goal-line interception against the Bills earlier this season, he kept his poise, remained cordial, and reiterated an earlier response in the exact wording from a different question asked by the same writer minutes earlier.
It's as if he is internally playing some weird perversion of Scrabble where points are awarded for avoiding new terms for the same ideas. We know he does love a good board game.
Which gets to the crux of what might be grating on Herbert. The games, which began as something leisurely—the opposite of work—have become laborious; monochromatic; flagellating even.
And that's just referring to the beatings he's taking on the field. You can only hope Herbert doesn't spend much time online, where he's become a veritable piñata lately.
In our modern world, sports occupy the same anthropocentric headspace they always have, though I would argue that the death of any monoculture has magnified it. The only advertising worth buying these days is tethered to live sports—the last bastion of the monoculture.
Sports offer pause; a respite from obligations. Remember that sports are essentially leisure. They represent a collective illusion of how we continue as individuals, teams, geographies, or communities, to participate in some shared happiness, or, as is more accurately the case for the Chargers this season, a communal grief.
The game unites us in exultation, and binds us in our melancholy. It breaks our hearts, empties our wallets, and, if you overindulge on a game day and get too handsy with the other spectators, it can get you arrested.
We knowingly give sports way too much influence over our emotional wellbeing, and, trade memes about it. A telltale sign of modernity, if ever there was one!
At its apex, sport embodies the absence of our obligations; a feeling so rare, and experienced with such intensity—so ephemeral that we associate the occasion with something that most closely resembles religion. Or, at worst, the dilapidated remembrance of a feeling which was once labeled, when first felt, as religious. There is no other way to describe it.
When Herbert threw an oblong-shaped bladder 70 yards on a zipline into the waiting arms of Jaylen Guyton like he was tossing his shirt into a hamper, it gives you pause. This is a game. Your mind accepts that, but you still feel as if you have witnessed the divine.
I was there that afternoon when Herbert tried to throw that football to heaven, just to see gravity and stardust drop it over Guyton's shoulder for the most jaw-dropping touchdown I have ever seen. We sit in a section that is predominantly owned by ticket brokers, which means that you don't learn a lot of names over the years.
There were more than a few Giants fans around I remember thinking about Jerry West receiving the Most Valuable Player award for an NBA Finals series that he lost. I thought about the New Yorkers who paid a month's rent to see Michael Jordan's last game at Madison Square Garden.
I thought about the Oakland Raiders fans that night in 2003 who saw Brett Favre: honor the loss of his father in the only way he knew how; by throwing four touchdowns, each throw more absurd than the one that preceded it in a runaway win. Those fans stood and cheered, even though their team played the role of the Washington Generals that night.
So as we stood cheering, I said to the Giants fans still seated glumly directly below us, "You guys can clap for that. Come on. You won't see something like that again; it's okay to stand up."
I don't think they did. Proof that you can be in the same room with Michelangelo as he paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and remain unmoved.
As a rookie, thrust into the starting lineup by an ill-placed needle into Tyrod Taylor's lung, Herbert promptly lost his first four starts, despite glimpses at the deep mine of potential trapped inside his stoicism and tucked somewhere beneath his enthusiasm for the Settlers of Catan.
Back then, Herbert said that his quarterback coach, Pep Hamilton, would remind him before every game to fave fun.
"Before every game, he (quarterbacks coach Pep Hamilton) tells me to go have fun. To realize that it's just a game and that you go out there and you play relaxed, that's when you play your best. So I give him a big hug every game before we go out there and just try to have fun, do our job, execute, and hopefully good things will happen." (A quote from January 3, 2021.)
The 2020 Chargers snapped that skid, and then immediately started another one, at which point Herbert was 1-7 as the starter. I bring this stretch up because we forget that his career began in darkness—to borrow the phrase from Tom Hardy's Bane.
The coaches and players still did media sessions, albeit by Zoom due to the pandemic. If you go back and watch some of those, you can see Herbert struggling with the losing, but still trying to look for that break in the clouds. A promise he made to himself and the organization that he's in it for the long haul; the compost will turn into coal.
"We're never going to give up. Losses are tough. This isn't easy for anyone. No one is enjoying this. Everyone is working real hard, and we are doing our best, and I know things are gonna change. I've said that before, but if you keep fighting, you keep executing, you keep getting better, then good things will happen."
-Justin Herbert, November 8, 2020.
There's that refrain again. "Good things will happen."
And good things have happened! The Chargers signed Herbert to a 5-year, $262.5 million contract extension in July of 2023. He led the team to back-to-back playoff appearances in 2024-2025, and has looked every bit the part of a franchise player that contending teams build around.
He has even become a reluctant role model for children both here and in his home state of Washington, where he volunteers his time and money to youth sports and education.
Recently, the team signed his younger brother, Patrick Herbert, a tight end, to the team's practice squad. Patrick played one offensive snap and another six on special teams in his regular-season NFL debut Sunday against the Bills.
To parrot the question Rocky Balboa asked Adrian on the beach: How did everything that was so good get so bad?
The Chargers at 0-7 are white-knuckling a ten-game losing streak dating back to last season. Should the Chargers somehow win their next game against the Houston Texans, 323 days have passed since their last win in Dallas on December 21. But who's counting?
Well, just about everyone is, which seems to feed into the problem.
Herbert has not looked like himself for a while now. He throws passes to the defense with such regularity this season that you can set your watch to it. His ten interceptions lead the NFL. Remember that two years ago, he threw three in the entire season! His interception rate of 0.6% was the lowest in the league.
There are still flashes of the freak athletic arm strength in every game, but they are becoming the exception, not the rule.
Against the Chiefs, Herbert was flushed from the pocket to his left when he spotted Quentin Johnston with a step on the defensive back. He flipped his hips back into the opposite direction and threw a parabola that Johnston didn't catch. The ball pinned itself to his chest 60 yards away. It caught him.
Johnston fell in a heap at the 1-yard line. First and goal, Chargers. The defender (look up his name Dom) walked away shaking his head in disbelief. Nobody makes that throw.
In a perfect encapsulation of their season, the sequence that followed Herbert's moon ball to the doorstep is as follows: penalty, run stuffed, pass to tight end Orande Gadsden that hit him in his hands before falling to the Arrowhead turf for an incompletion.
Last Sunday in the final play of the first half, he stepped through the Rams' pass rush and heaved a pass nearly sixty yards to the goal line. The ball hit receiver Quentin Johnston in the hands, ricocheted off, and was caught by teammate Ladd McConkey inches away from a touchdown before being swarmed by defenders.
There is some glitch in the software with the Los Angeles Chargers these days. If it is maddening to us as fans to see two 50-yard passes completed (in consecutive games!) to the 1-yard line not result in touchdowns, then how much more maddening is it to the players, who do not have the luxury of switching their focus to other more rewarding recreations?
Yesterday Herbert was asked what he likes to do when he gets home to unwind. The answer was both a reminder of how much the games tax the combatants, and how much we miscalculate how few minutes in their day are not consumed by football.
So, are you doing anything different at home that has made you bad at your job?
"We usually leave pretty late so there's not a whole lot of free time when you go home," said Herbert. "More so we're watching film here and when it's time to go its time to go to bed and wake up and do the next thing tomorrow. . . (you) watch as much film as you can, treatment, body work, lifting, doing everything that you can to be ready for Sunday."
Nice try, though!
Even when the old brilliance of a younger quarterback unburdened by pundits or expectations flashes like a ray of light through the clouds for an instant, his coaches or teammates are ready to disappoint.
Against the Chiefs, Herbert completed a short pass to Keandre Lambert Smith, who turned up the field and would have converted a first down if not for the blocking attempt of teammate Quentin Johnston, who collided with Smith and caused him to fumble.
His fumbles have come due to extending the play under duress; his eyes darting downfield to locate any receiver who has finally separated — which far too often in 2026 has a low probability of being completed because the Chargers players will either drop it or have turned the wrong way on their route.
Against the Rams, the embattled offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel called back-to-back double reverse flea flicker passes; the sort of devil-may-care move reserved for eight-year-old little brothers playing Madden.
Last season, Herbert was pressured not only more than any other passer from a volume standpoint, but also at the league’s highest rate. Much of the same refrain has echoed in 2026, as the Chargers are effectively already down to four backup offensive linemen starting going into Week 8. In turn, Herbert has been pressured on 45.8% of his dropbacks — the second-highest mark of any qualified quarterback.
Perhaps the most alarming is that Herbert now looks uncomfortable at times even playing from a clean pocket.
Spacial awareness. Field vision. Diagnosis of the opponent's alignments and personnel. Faith in himself. Faith in his arm and the willingness to uncork the deep, long-developing routes. All of these performative traits that Herbert had in abundance seem to have deserted him.
He does not look like himself. Our eyes collectively are not lying to us. Armchair psychiatrists blame anyone from owner Dean Spans, to fiancé Madison Beer to his discordant relationship with offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel; his eighth in his last eleven years dating back to his college career at Oregon.
Easier to imagine an alien doppelganger than the guy under center wearing his jersey these days.
How did everything that was so good get so bad?
Herbert's punchless offense is dead last in EPA per play, 32th in success rate, and 32st in scoring drive rate. They have not scored a touchdown in nine quarters going back to October 11. They have been their own biggest obstacles at times and lead the league in pre-snap penalties.
Sloppy, undisciplined, and unprepared. The Chargers have the look of a team that should be relegated.
Standing before the inquisitors, or beat writers after every game and on every Wednesday, Herbert has attempted to shoulder the blame, and his copy reads like an employee handbook: conservative, deliberate, circumspect, boilerplate.
Which doesn't make for great copy. Nor does it endear him to a frustrated fanbase that bristles beneath the deluge of memes, reels, and other fans' ribbing. It is not newsworthy that the Chargers are a punchline; that comes with the territory.
The beat reporters do not need to ask, but for some reason they still did: What do you make of those comments, essentially laughing at your performances?
"I haven't looked into it," said Herbert. "I haven't heard anything about it, so I can't really make a comment about it."
I don't know what else they expect him to say, but I know if his work ever becomes fun again then he won’t have to say anything.
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