Swanson: Chargers’ QB Justin Herbert is a gamer, and you’ve got to respect it

INGLEWOOD – Respect.

Such was the theme of Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh’s post-loss news conference Sunday: Respect for his team, banged up and short-handed, for pushing the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Kansas Chiefs.

Respect for those get-’er-done Chiefs, who took the lead for the first and final time with 6:04 left in the fourth quarter of their 17-10 victory, improving to 4-0 this season and extending their winning streak as guests of the Chargers to 11 games – rude, but respectable.

And, assuredly, respect for Justin Herbert.

The Chargers’ gimpy quarterback played despite being limited with a high ankle sprain and despite taking snaps behind a patchwork offensive line that we all knew would leave him more vulnerable.

“I mean, he’s doing everything humanly possible,” Harbaugh said. “And then some.”

Load management, what? Injury management, who?

The NFL, brutal by nature and unsafe by definition, is not a sport that often plays it safe.

And yet before Sunday’s game, there was an understandable sentiment that Herbert really ought to take the game off.

The Chargers were likely to lose anyway. The less-than-optimal pass protection worried everyone; what if his injury worsened? And the team has a bye week coming, which would have given Herbert two full weeks to heal.

Why risk it?

“I look to those guys in the locker room, and I know that everyone else in that locker room would do it as well,” Herbert said after completing 16 of his 27 passing attempts for 179 yards and one touchdown, capping the Chargers’ first drive by slinging an exquisite pass that only Ladd McConkey could catch in the back of the end zone to give their team the lead.

“Everyone’s not feeling great,” Herbert added. “It’s the NFL. It’s a tough, brutal game.”

That’s exactly why any well-meaning fans and pundits thought the Chargers ought to step in and protect Herbert from himself, that they should use their heads to override his heart for one game out of the 17 on the Chargers’ schedule.

Instead, his coaches game-planned in a way that was meant to keep him as safe as possible, emphasizing the ground game and quick throws (plans that weren’t helped by offensive linemen too frequently being called for pre-snap penalties that pushed the Chargers backward).

The team’s training staff game-planned too, of course, working with Herbert to get him prepared. They equipped him with a brace beneath a bulky wrap around his right ankle, which was sprained in a Week 2 win over the Carolina Panthers.

Herbert – who was limited in training camp by a plantar fascia injury and who in seasons past played with a fractured left middle finger and fractured rib cartilage and was actually forced off the field only by a fractured index finger on his throwing hand – sat out two days of practice ahead of the Chargers’ game against the Steelers in Pittsburgh on Sept. 22.

Ultimately he started that game too, but exited after the injury was exacerbated by a nasty sack in the third quarter of the Chargers’ 20-10 loss: “I pushed myself, and I couldn’t go anymore,” he said afterward.

The difference between being hurt and injured can be a personal thing, it seems, that axis where pain tolerance meets priorities. After Sunday’s loss, Herbert said he thought his ankle “held up well,” even though it “took a couple hits, for the most part, the integrity held up pretty good.”

And even though he finished Sunday’s affair, the Chargers didn’t complete the assignment, falling to 2-2. It was a frustrating result. A risk unrewarded. It had the normally mild-mannered former Oregon Duck slamming his helmet into the bench on the sideline after another unrequited second-half drive.

And I know it got some fans, online and in real life, complaining. A peanut gallery – ignoring or forgetting or not caring that Herbert is hobbled – that was unimpressed with a Chargers offense that scored on its first two drives but never again, that had some doubters going so far as to disparage the quarterback, to insist that he’s overrated.

Respect for a guy who doesn’t care what people think. For a gamer willing to try his best even if he knows he’s not going to look his best.

And respect for Harbaugh and his coaches for trusting Herbert to have at it – even if it felt to me like watching a freestyle motocross rider attempt a double backflip for the first time, some real daredevil stuff.

Did you, at home, feel yourself holding your breath every one of the 10 times he was hit?

“Yeah, yes,” Harbaugh said, he was too.

But Herbert? Dude doesn’t blink.

“I felt comfortable,” he said. “Our communication with the training staff has been great all week. And I know all those guys in the locker room would do the same thing.”

And, so yes, he could stand there and tell us, “I know that I left everything I had out there.”

Much respect.

Justin Herbert doing this on a bum ankle versus the defending champs

Never disrespect this man pic.twitter.com/EmhMCMl4gt

— Joel Moran (@joelvmoran) September 29, 2024