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I hate it when people don’t return their shopping carts, too.
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Our quarterback is a golden god. -
That Article in Athletic gave me such a football hard-on yesterday. Needed to take a cold shower.
I don't know when in last decade I was more amped for a football season.Comment
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I hear ya.Originally posted by DragonIce View Post
Just imagine Drew Brees in New Orleans, circa 2011. Then make him 6’6. Make him faster. Give him a rocket launcher for an arm. Give him better hair and more facial symmetry. That’s the potential of Herbert in this offense.Our quarterback is a golden god.Comment
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I just read this, awesome piece by Popper. I enjoy his coverage, main reason I subscribeOriginally posted by Xenos View Postmigrated from chargerfans.net then the thenflforum.com then hereComment
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Here’s the entire article for everyone:Originally posted by Xenos View Post
Justin Herbert walked to the line of scrimmage late in the first quarter in an empty SoFi Stadium in December and set up under center Dan Feeney. The Chargers, then 3-9, were taking on the Falcons in a Week 14 matchup. The game was scoreless and Herbert and the offense faced a second-and-goal from the 10-yard line. As Herbert settled behind Feeney, he looked to his right at Keenan Allen, who was positioned on the hash marks split off the outside shoulder of tight end Hunter Henry.
Herbert and Allen made eye contact for a split second. Just a slight hesitation. Then Herbert sent Austin Ekeler, who was lined up offset right behind Allen, in motion to the left side of the formation.
Watching live, this eye contact seemed benign, even meaningless. But in that second, the thoughts rolling through Herbert’s mind shine a light on his burgeoning relationship with one of the NFL’s best receivers.
You see, Herbert was supposed to audible. The initial play call was a pass. Allen was the primary read on an out route. But, based on how the play unfolded in practice, Herbert was told he should kill the play to a run if the cornerback was playing outside leverage on Allen, defending against the very out route he was slated to run.
Herbert got to the line and saw Falcons rookie A.J. Terrell shaded to Allen’s outside, with his back to the sideline. So he looked over at Allen, who gave him a subtle shake of the head.
“Herb, this is not it,” Allen remembered thinking in that moment. “There’s no chance. This is a first-round draft pick. I don’t want this guy to pick me off. If he picks me off and goes 99 yards, it’s your fault.”
Allen stared into Herbert’s soul like a mother catching her son reaching into the cookie jar.
“Herbert. Kill it.”
Herbert got the message but did not listen. He looked away after Ekeler passed behind him and readied for the snap. As Herbert started his snap count, Allen raised his right hand up and turned his palm to the sky.
“What are you doing?”
“I remember looking at him and I was like, ‘Nah, I’m gonna throw this one,’” Herbert recalled. “And so we did it.”
“Fuck it,” Allen said.
Herbert took the snap, dropped back and faked a handoff to Kalen Ballage. As he did, Falcons defensive end Steven Meansbeat Henry off the edge. With pressure bearing down, Herbert retreated in the pocket to give Allen time to break.
Allen still did not think he was getting the ball. Nothing about the coverage led him to believe he was even an option. The Falcons had made the perfect call, and Herbert had not adjusted.
“I ran the route, like, nonchalant,” Allen said.
Herbert fired a laser off his back foot, fitting the throw into a tiny window past a diving Terrell. Allen had created just enough separation.
Touchdown Chargers.
“He throws a fucking dime,” Allen said.
Allen pointed back at Herbert just before celebrating with a dance.
“It’s just one of those plays where I trusted Keenan,” Herbert said. “I just thought, ‘Keenan is this special player, I’m going to see what I can do with him.’”
“We talked about it after the game,” Herbert added. “He was like, ‘I wanted you to kill that.’ I was like, ‘You’re glad I didn’t kill it, huh?’”
This play was both a culmination and a window into the future.
Herbert was Tyrod Taylor’s backup throughout training camp. He didn’t take first-team reps until his surprise first NFL start in Week 2 against the Chiefs after a mishap with Taylor’s pregame rib injection. Herbert was forced to develop his rapport with Allen on the fly, mostly in games. Over 12 weeks, that turned into an unwavering trust — a trust so strong that Herbert felt comfortable ignoring what should have been a no-brainer check in that Falcons game.
Now Herbert — one of the most exciting talents in the game with a chance to cement himself as a truly elite quarterback as he enters his second pro season — is the unquestioned starter. He has spent an entire offseason cultivating his on-field connection with Allen.
Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. Steve Young and Rice. Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin. Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison. More recently, Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson. Matt Ryan and Julio Jones. Drew Brees and Michael Thomas. They were all here once.
Could Herbert and Allen be the NFL’s next great quarterback-receiver duo?
“Absolutely,” Allen said. “We can’t be stopped.”
On the night of April 23, 2020, the Chargers drafted Justin Herbert with No. 6 pick. Days later, Herbert packed up his car and drove from Eugene, Ore., to Costa Mesa, Calif., to begin his NFL career.
With the pandemic still in its early stages, teams were not permitted to hold rookie minicamp or offseason workouts. The Chargers quarterbacks and skill players, instead, took to fields in Orange County to get in their work.
Taylor, the veteran entering his second season with the Chargers, was organizing and running the workouts. He threw to the first four receivers, including Allen. Then Easton Stick, a Chargers fifth-round pick in 2019, threw to the next two receivers. Herbert, the rookie, got the scraps. He grew up a Chargers fan, though, and had been watching Allen from afar for years.
“I was just kind of admiring everyone,” Herbert, speaking in a 30-minute interview with The Athletic, remembers of those early-May workouts.
It was not until training camp that Herbert actually attempted a pass to Allen. All those throws came in routes-against-air or one-on-ones. Taylor was taking all the first-team reps as the team’s declared starter. Herbert was working exclusively with the second and third teams.
Which only makes what happened next even more remarkable.
We all know the story by now. The Chargers hosted the Chiefs in their home opener in Week 2. Taylor had suffered a rib injury in the season opener at the Bengals while taking a hit. A pregame pain injection punctured his lung. Taylor went to the hospital, and Herbert found out minutes before kickoff that he was about to make his NFL debut.
The first pass attempt of Herbert’s career, fittingly, went to Allen. He handed off to Ekeler twice. Then on a first-and-10, Allen motioned into the right slot and ran a wheel route down the right sideline. Allen stopped his route 15 yards downfield, working back toward Herbert. He was open.
And Herbert, well …
“Just sailed it,” Herbert said with a smile.
“Voof!” Allen said, waving his hand quickly over his head to mimic the high throw. “What the fuck was that?”
“I just thought he was excited,” Allen added. “I didn’t think that was a normal ball.”
He paused.
“It’s a normal ball.”
Allen trotted back to his quarterback and tried to settle him down.
“I told him to relax,” Allen said. “That shit was hot.”
“He came back to the huddle and said, ‘All right, you got that one out of your system. Let’s dial it back,’” Herbert said.
Five plays later, Herbert capped his first touchdown drive with a 4-yard scramble.
His first completion to Allen came on the next drive on a bubble screen. Allen took that for 14 yards. On the following series, Herbert went to Allen again, this time on an out-breaking option route near the right sideline on third down. He threw high again. The Chargers punted.
“I was salty at that point,” Allen recalled. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is about to happen?’”
Herbert answered that question pretty definitively.
Behind a sound defensive plan and an unexpected performance from their surprise starting quarterback, the Chargers had built a 14-6 lead over the defending champion Chiefs. On his first possession of the second half, Herbert moved the Chargers close to midfield. He faced a third-and-10.
Herbert took the shotgun snap and was almost immediately pressured by Kansas City defensive end Taco Charlton, who beat Henry off the right edge. Allen was running a post out of the right slot.
“As soon as the ball was snapped, I knew it was Cover 2,” Allen said. “I knew I should be getting the ball.”
Herbert stood in the pocket and delivered down the middle of the field, releasing the pass just before Charlton hit him. He layered the ball in between two defenders. Allen made the catch for a 25-yard gain, hanging on despite a big hit from Chiefs cornerback L’Jarius Sneed, who had peeled off his man to try and make a play over the top. Allen did not see Sneed coming.
“He hit me and I was like, ‘Damn!’” Allen said. “He threw that shit in there.”
“If you look at the back angle of the camera … you don’t even see the hole,” Herbert said. “That’s where faith and that’s where practice reps come into play.”
But here’s the thing: Herbert and Allen did not have any practice reps. Herbert did not attempt a pass to Allen in an 11-on-11 setting until this very game. Early on in training camp and even during the season, Herbert was still focused on some of the basics of playing the position in the NFL, like taking snaps from under center — something he did not do at Oregon — opening up the correct way on handoffs and properly executing play-action fakes.
Herbert remembers a play from practice not long after he took over as starter when he tried to send Allen in motion pre-snap. Only Allen was not supposed to be the motion man.
“He just shakes his head,” Herbert said, “and I flip it to the other way.”
That is what makes the relationship so fascinating. That is what makes the production, from their first game together, so hard to wrap your mind around. Herbert was a neophyte as a quarterback. And he was forced to build trust with Allen, initially, from merely watching him from the practice sideline.
And yet the on-field connection started like this, and only grew more solid over the rest of the season. Herbert and Allen connected 96 times for 955 yards and eight touchdowns. Of those 96 completions, 28 produced third-down conversions.
“He’s always open,” Herbert said.
“No, seriously,” Allen said. “I am always open.”
Allen has been through this process once before. At their height, Allen and former Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers made up one of the best quarterback-receiver tandems in the league. Over seven seasons together, Rivers and Allen totaled 520 completions for 6,364 yards and 33 touchdowns. Under Rivers’ tutelage, Allen developed from a talented but injury-prone prospect into arguably the game’s most lethal route runner and one of the most consistent receivers in the league.
“Phil taught me so well and taught me so much,” Allen said.
Rivers is retired now, coaching high school football in Alabama, and it feels as though Allen is entering a second chapter of his career.
Allen is on a Hall of Fame trajectory. He turned 29 in April. If he produces five more seasons at the pace he has set over the past four years, he will crack the top five all-time in receptions.
Allen has a chance to become the first player in NFL history to catch 500 passes from two different quarterbacks. He needs 404 more catches from Herbert to get there. He has averaged 101 catches over his past four seasons. You do the math.
Rice never did it. Tony Gonzalez never did it. Larry Fitzgerald is the only player in NFL history to catch 400 passes from two different quarterbacks — Kurt Warner and Carson Palmer.
This is all very much in the realm of possibility for Allen. That is partly because of who is now throwing him the ball and how much potential Herbert holds in his towering 6-foot-6 frame. But it’s also because of just how damn good and reliable Allen is. The league is only really now starting to give Allen his due credit.
“If he is not in the top five, I’d love to see the top five,” Herbert said, “because I think he’s as good as it gets.”
Allen does not catch 70-yard touchdowns on a weekly basis. His performance is more subtle, more artistic. The beauty of his game is not in the flashiness, but in the less discernible aspects — the releases, the breaks at the top of his routes, the deception of his effortless movements, his knowledge of coverages, his feel for positioning and his almost innate understanding of how to shatter defender’s leverage.
“I have the answers to the test,” Allen said.
“Keenan could play quarterback too,” Herbert said. “He knows defenses better than anyone else.”
This is why Allen is so effective on third down. He has the most third-down-conversion receptions of any receiver in the league since 2017 with 98. DeAndre Hopkins has the next most with 83. Allen led the league in this stat in 2020, with 28, in 15 games.
“If you didn’t have lines on the field, it wouldn’t matter,” Herbert said. “Keenan would still get to the right place.”
The best could still be ahead for Allen. Herbert’s skill set opens so many doors. Rivers thrived because of his brain and accuracy, and he might very well be on his way to the Hall of Fame. Herbert, though, simply provides two things Rivers did not: elite arm strength, and the ability to both escape the pocket and throw on the run.
“It’s night and day,” Allen said of playing with Rivers versus Herbert. “(With Rivers), you got a guy who is going to go through his progressions every time. … You can line up with Philip Rivers and you can say, well, he’s not throwing the ball to this side of the field. He’s not coming over here, just based on the defense. Pre-snap read, Phil is going to that side. Like, it’s 100 percent. Justin Herbert? There’s no chance! There’s no fucking chance. He’s throwing where he wants to throw the ball. He doesn’t care.”
Allen said when the Chargers moved on from Rivers last offseason and elevated Taylor to starter, they started practicing scramble drills for the first time. This was a new facet to the offense that just did not exist previously. Herbert then took it to another level when he replaced Taylor.
“He’s bringing up a whole new game,” Allen said. “Phil couldn’t run. Phil could throw the dime, but what if I’m not open right now? Herbert can scramble and then I can re-get open.”
Herbert thrives in off-platform situations. He also has enough confidence in himself to, say, shrug off an audible call, defensive coverages be damned.
“It ain’t new, but it ain’t the same thing,” Allen said. “It’s Keenan without Phil.”
Or, alternatively, it’s Keenan with Justin.
During OTAs in early June, new Chargers offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi shared his vision for Allen in his passing scheme.
“We always say that there are rules guys and guidelines guys,” Lombardi said. “Here are the rules to the routes; some of you have to follow them exactly, but for some of you, they’re guidelines.”
Allen?
“He’s definitely a guidelines guy,” Lombardi said.
Lombardi spent more than a decade as the Saints quarterbacks coach working with Brees and under Sean Payton, and he has brought that passing system to Los Angeles. One of the hallmarks of the scheme is a heavy dose of option routes, which are perfectly tailored for Allen’s skill set because of his spatial awareness and feel for leverages.
Allen said this is allowing him to “play more freely,” and that is largely related to these option routes. As a “guidelines” player, Allen can put his own flavor on routes. In football parlance, this is called “pumping” a route.
For instance, Allen might have an option route where he can break in, break out, or sit in an open space. Based on the leverage of the defenders pre-snap or on tape, though, he might see an opening and want to take a higher angle up the field. He would fake like he is running a sharp out route before splitting the defenders on a deeper line.
“Sometimes, he’ll look to me and tell me he’s going to pump it,” Herbert said. “So he’ll do something crazy and I’m just like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ll find you.’”
Allen’s freedom in the scheme will also affect how Herbert goes through his progressions. Lombardi has given Herbert leeway to stay on Allen longer than he would with other receivers.
“Sometimes you’re late to the rest of the progression,” Herbert said, “but you know that Keenan will find a way to get open.”
“Normally a mortal quarterback would say, ‘I’m not giving it to him, I’m going to my progression,’” Lombardi said. “But, he ends up getting open so often that sometimes, as a quarterback, you give him an extra count.”
It is a fine line.
Herbert recalls a play from training camp where he moved off Allen on a progression because Chris Harris Jr. had him covered. Herbert completed a crossing route to Jalen Guyton for a 20-yard gain. Watching the play back on tape, though, Herbert saw that Allen came open after he had already moved on from that read.
“Had I stuck on him,” Herbert said, “it would have been a walk-in touchdown.”
“You just got to be right,” Allen added. “When he does do it, he has to be right. When he doesn’t do it, he has to be right again. He has to know when and when not, but he’ll get it with more repetition.”
As Lombardi said, this is a “good problem to have.”
“Keenan would have a good relationship with any quarterback,” he added. “He’s a guy that you trust so much. When in doubt, you find him and throw him the football.”
“I want to play with him for as long as I can,” Herbert said. “And for as long as I can play with Keenan, I’m going to do my best to get him the ball.”
On July 8, Herbert held a charity golf tournament in Eugene to raise money for a youth sports non-profit. He invited a number of his Chargers teammates, including Allen.
Allen initially said via text he would “love to go.” But when Herbert later texted Allen for his flight information so he could book the travel for his top receiver, he got no response.
“Keenan’s probably busy,” Herbert remembered thinking. “He’s got something going on.”
Two days before the event, Herbert’s phone lit up with a text from Allen.
“You got my flight?”
“I was like, ‘I got to get on this!’” Herbert said.
Herbert sent the flight to Allen, and Allen arrived the next day, joining Scott Quessenberry, Michael Badgley, Storm Norton, Gabe Nabers and others for the event.
It says something that Allen wanted to support Herbert, right?
“I think he just really likes golf,” Herbert deadpanned.
Allen also really likes his quarterback.Comment
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The Athletic by Robert Mays
The QB is the System: How the Chargers are building their offense through Justin Herbert
Robert Mays Sep 3, 2021
60 
During the summer of 2009, Brandon Staley took a trip that forever altered his football life. Staley, then just a 26-year-old assistant at Division III powerhouse St. Thomas in Minnesota, talked his way into a week’s worth of meetings and practices with the Saints’ quarterbacks. Joe Lombardi, the Saints’ QB coach at the time, had been the offensive coordinator during Staley’s stint as the QB at Mercyhurst College, and the enterprising young assistant parlayed that connection into six days within the Saints’ inner sanctum.
New Orleans led the NFL in scoring the previous season and Staley’s time with Drew Brees and Sean Payton gave him an intimate look at what kept the best offense in football humming.
“He’s a brand-new coach, and he was just seeing that the Saints were really successful,” Lombardi said. “And he always wanted to know why. What do you guys do? How do you do it?”
By the time the week was over, Staley had his answer. He was floored by the level of detail that permeated every aspect of New Orleans’ approach. Staley specifically remembers the script reviews New Orleans would conduct before the following day’s practice, which included plans for how every play would function against all the possible looks a defense could throw at them.
“Every walkthrough,” Staley said. “How intentional every single play was. To get the right personnel grouping. To get the right formation. To get the right motion. So that you can get the right matchup … I just think that they poured into all those little things that make a big difference.”
Now in his first season as the Chargers’ head coach, Staley has been open about why he chose Lombardi as his offensive coordinator and the Saints’ system as the unit’s foundation. With the endless combinations of personnel packages, formations and motions, the New Orleans offense mirrors Staley’s approach on defense. To put it simply, playing against that offense makes for a miserable week at the office. But beyond the mechanics of the Saints’ system, Staley was also drawn to the way that Brees shaped every facet of the New Orleans offense.
“I felt like the quarterback had full command over what was happening,” Staley said. “There wasn’t anything that was getting run in those practices that wasn’t designed for Drew Brees, that he wasn’t truly invested in.”
In Justin Herbert, the Chargers have a 23-year-old quarterback fresh off one of the best seasons for a rookie quarterback in NFL history. With Lombardi on staff and the Saints’ offensive blueprint in hand, the Chargers’ goal wasn’t to drop Herbert into an offensive system that already existed. It was to turn that quarterback into the offensive system.
“That experience shaped me as a coach,” Staley said of his time with the Saints. “Now being with Justin, so much of that experience has stayed with me.”
To understand the complexion of the Chargers’ offensive plan, let’s rewind to the early days of 2021, when Staley was hired as the team’s head coach. Staley had long decided that Lombardi — who he’s known for almost 20 years — and the Saints’ central principles would form the offense’s foundation. But there were other key elements he felt compelled to poach from some of the league’s top offenses based on how they complemented Herbert’s abilities.
As the Rams’ defensive coordinator last season, Staley got an up-close look at the tenets that make the wide-zone, play-action systems of Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan so successful. The Shanahan scheme is a nightmare for opposing defensive coaches because every aspect of the offense is tied together and looks almost identical for the first few steps of a given play.
“I also knew that I needed the run game and the keeper game to align, which is a strength of Sean and Kyle,” Staley said. “It’s also a strength of Justin, being able to throw on the move and to be able to get him outside and to change the launch point and to put pressure on defenses because of the marriage of the run and the pass.”
To help incorporate some of those principles, Staley hired former 49ers quarterbacks coach Shane Day as his passing game coordinator. Day has worked hand-in-hand with offensive line coach Frank Smith to hone that harmonious run-pass marriage that makes teams like San Francisco such a challenge.
The final component of the Chargers’ three-pronged approach emerged from a blend of Herbert’s own history and Staley’s latest lesson as a defensive play-caller. During last year’s playoffs, the Packers took advantage of the Rams’ focus on erasing explosive plays by turning to Aaron Rodgers’s strengths as a quick-trigger quarterback. The shotgun-based, RPO aspect of Green Bay’s offense didn’t exist in New Orleans. That’s an area where Chargers tight ends coach Kevin Koger — a former Packers quality control assistant — has been able to lend his experience to the offensive gumbo simmering in Los Angeles.
“When I meant uniquely shaping the offense for Justin, that’s what I mean,” Staley said. “There’s certain things that we can do that they didn’t do with Drew [Brees].”
By leaning more heavily into RPOs, the Chargers will incorporate more of the spread-out, wide-open features of the offense that Herbert grew up running at Oregon.
“I feel like that’s helped Justin operate at a high level,” Staley said. “Getting him in that comfort zone, allowing him to see the defense, and make quick decisions and truly play point guard. Because that to me is truly what the RPO game is, it’s playing point guard.”
(Photo: Michael Owens/Getty Images)
When Staley visited New Orleans in 2009, Lombardi was in his first few months as the Saints’ quarterbacks coach but well into his third year with the franchise. Aside from a two-year sojourn as the Lions’ offensive coordinator from 2014-2015, Lombardi has spent nearly his entire 16-year professional coaching career in New Orleans. That experience, the Saints’ ideologies, and the lessons they imbued seep into every aspect of who he is as a coach.
“It’s something that Sean Payton always says that sticks with me,” Lombardi said. “He’d say, ‘It’s not what we do here that makes us good. It’s how we do it.’ The attention to detail, the amount of care and effort that goes into game-planning, the molding of the offense, and the playbook, and the game plans around your players.”
A prevailing belief in the Saints’ building is that the quarterback should have input on every component of the offense, no matter how minute. That privilege extended beyond Drew Brees.
“They cater the offense to you and how you feel in it,” said Luke McCown, who played in New Orleans from 2013 to 2016. “Because ultimately, you’re the only one pulling the trigger to get the ball to where it needs to go on game day. The more comfortable you are, the better you’ll execute the offense.”
In New Orleans, Brees and Lombardi worked together not only on which route combinations fit the offense but which receivers fit which routes and why. Saints receivers had differing amounts of freedom within the offense depending on the familiarity they had with the system and how comfortable Brees felt with letting them feel out certain route depths and aiming points in real time. That intimate knowledge about the idiosyncrasies of his pass catchers allowed Brees to suggest specific players for specific roles within individual route concepts, a process that Herbert has been ironing out since the spring.
“When you go out in the offseason, before practice, or during practice, Jared Cook is going to run a stop differently than Mike Williams does,” Herbert said. “He’s going to run it differently than Keenan (Allen) does. But being out there and repping it with them, that’s the best way to learn it.”
In March, the Chargers brought in Chase Daniel to serve as both the backup quarterback and as a resource for Herbert as he learned the ins and outs of how the Saints’ approach operates. Daniel spent five total seasons over two stops in New Orleans, and he’s had a close-up look at how Lombardi solicits feedback from his quarterback to shape the system.
“That’s what I think is really cool about Joe,” said Daniel. “He really checks his ego at the door. Obviously he’s the guy in charge of the offense, but he always asks for input, especially from the quarterback position. And especially from Justin.”
Lombardi has also brought specific rituals with him from New Orleans that are designed to enhance the quarterback’s voice in molding the offense to his specifications. On the eve of each game during the season, the Saints would hold a session they called the “dot meeting,” where the quarterbacks and offensive staff would go through every possible play for the following day and gauge the starting quarterback’s enthusiasm for each one by placing a dot next to his favorite calls.
“I may think it’s the greatest play in the world, but if you’re breaking the huddle, and you’re like, ‘I don’t really feel great about this, I don’t want to run it,’” then we won’t,’” Lombardi said. “I think every quarterback, there’s a certain handful of concepts where they’re like, ‘Man, you call this, I’ll find you a completion. I know it so well. I’m so comfortable with it.’ That’s what we’re aiming for, just getting that communication and experience where I know exactly what he likes.”
Everything from Lombardi’s coaching ethos to the structure of certain meetings is designed to solicit feedback from Herbert, but the process only works if the quarterback is willing to speak up and assert his authority within the offense. That part has been a work in progress with Herbert, who at 23 years old may be as amiable as he is talented.
“These guys, they’re so competitive,” Lombardi said. “They’re pleasers. They don’t like to tell you, ‘I don’t like that.’ So we’ve tried to just keep that communication open, and say, ‘Hey, man, be honest. There’s a million plays we can run. We don’t have to run one you don’t like.’”
To help foster that open dialogue, Staley has leaned on Daniel, whose familiarity with the Saints’ meeting environment has helped him serve as a useful example of how quarterbacks and coaches should interact. During training camp, the Chargers have also tried to accelerate the feedback process by drilling down on a handful of core ideas that Herbert favors.
“When we’ve actually been going live, and we’ve truly been able to feel and express a lot of these routes and concepts, I think that relationship has really grown,” Staley said. “I think Joe’s been able to witness — whether it’s routes on air, individual, practice — ‘This is his wheelhouse. This is what he really likes,’ and keep calling that so that you create even more confidence. Instead of dabbling in a bunch of everything, we’ve been able to hone in more.”
There are plenty of tangible benefits to shaping an offense around a quarterback’s particular tastes, but McCown says that there’s also a less concrete advantage that Lombardi’s method helps to unearth: Quarterbacks are more likely to buy into an offense when they’ve had a part in building it.
“That’s the key to any young quarterback in the NFL,” McCown said. “He’ll only be as good as the amount of ownership he has — and feels like he has — in the offense. You feel really comfortable when you can say, ‘Man, I created this thing. It’s built around me. It’s built to the things that I like to do.’”
There will — and should — be multiple areas where the Chargers’ vision diverges from how Brees operated during his Hall of Fame career. Staley and Lombardi are both quick to praise Herbert’s football smarts, but aptitude only goes so far. There are aspects of the offense that a sophomore QB, no matter how sharp, can’t grasp in the same way Brees could late in his carer.
“I think the big thing is this is Year 1 of our offense,” Staley said. “We’re not gonna treat this like it’s Year 15 in New Orleans.”
For most of his time in New Orleans, Brees was responsible for every component of the Saints’ offense. Every Mike linebacker identification, every play check, every protection change. They all ran through Brees because that’s the way he wanted it.
One of Lombardi’s challenges during his first offseason with the Chargers has been finding the right balance between utilizing Herbert’s impressive intellect and not overloading a young quarterback with too many tasks. To sort out the correct proportions, Lombardi has given Herbert full responsibility in some areas but only partial control in others. During OTAs, Lombardi and the staff threw the Saints’ entire gamut of complex personnel groupings, formations, and motions at Herbert and basically told him to sink or swim.
“Their mindset was, ‘We’re gonna put it all in, and you’re going to struggle,’” Herbert said. “‘But you’re going to find out a lot about yourself and find out a lot about the offense. Early on, it was tough. Even walkthroughs were tough. But as the weeks go on, you start to feel more comfortable.”
Throughout OTAs and the early days of training camp, Herbert wore a wristband that helped him with the dense verbiage for each of the Chargers’ play calls. Unlike some offenses, the Chargers will often tag individual players within each call — a Brees preference to simplify the offense for everyone else even if meant complicating it for himself.
“My thing was you just have to visualize it,” Herbert said. “When you get out there and you hear the play, it does seem like a lot. And [Joe] talks really quickly. I have to slow him down sometimes. He’ll give a play, and I’ll say, ‘This is the formation. This is the motion. This is how it all ties in together.’ When you can visualize it and go through it, I think that’s best.”
After routinely stumbling through calls this spring, Herbert says something clicked late in the Chargers’ first week of training camp practices. Shortly before the team’s public practice at SoFi Stadium on August 7th, Herbert ditched the wristband for good.
“Drew, when I was with him, we were always studying,” Daniel said. “Studying, studying, studying. Just to memorize plays and to understand them. I think that’s what made Drew so good. I think with Justin, he sorta just hears it a few times and gets it. It’s sort of like that Beautiful Mind type of memory.”
The Chargers have been slightly more cautious when it comes to saddling Herbert with protection responsibilities. Part of the thinking behind signing All-Pro center Corey Linsley this offseason was that bringing in a veteran pivot with Linsley’s experience would allow the Chargers to develop Herbert’s role in dictating protections at their own pace.
“ [Justin] doesn’t have to sit there and think about it every snap,” Lombardi said. “He can leave it to the center until he sees something different that he wants to change. That just takes a little bit of mental energy off the quarterback.”
(Photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Herbert has final say on protection calls and has already shown notable growth in his first few months within the system, but by installing Linsley as the first link in the chain of communication, the Chargers are hoping that Herbert can play with the freedom and confidence that make him such a gifted thrower.
“I wanted him to be able to play,” Staley said. “Yes, you’re gonna have to know this, and yes, he does know it. But he’s got a system of checks and balances with Corey Linsley that’s going to allow him to be the fullest version of himself. And then in time, Justin will be able to do all that by himself. But there’s a sequencing that matters when you’re coaching a player.”
The Chargers are hoping that with time, the mental aspect of Herbert’s game creeps closer and closer to where Brees was late in his career. But the physical aspects are a different story entirely. By the time Brees hit his late 30s, his arm strength had began to decline to the point that New Orleans had to reshape its offensive approach around his rare ability to beat defenses with a combination of his mind and quick release.
“Drew knew where he was throwing it before the ball was even snapped, usually,” Lombardi said. “He wasn’t going to throw it as far as Justin can throw it. So, our offense, especially as the years went on, became a little bit more about shorter passes, because he was going to complete 80 percent of them.”
But as McCown, Staley, and others all pointed out, it’s important to not confuse the Saints offense from 2020 to the system New Orleans ran during the early years of the Brees-Payton partnership. “I think everyone forgets that when Drew was really rolling, they were throwing the ball down the field,” Staley said. “You don’t throw for 5,000 yards throwing Stick and Spacing. You throw for 5,000 yards because you’re throwing the ball down the field.”
Daniel says that some of the deeper posts and spearconcepts that were thrown out later in Brees’ career have returned with Herbert at the controls. They’ve even renamed a few of the Saints classics, if only to accentuate the Chargers spin they’ve tried to put on the offense. A more aggressive Saints downfield play called “Giant,” for reasons Lombardi still doesn’t quite know, has been renamed “Poison.” “There’s a post, an over, and an in,” Lombardi said. Coach [Staley] is like, “Well, let’s call it Poison. Post, over, in. ‘Poison.’ I was like, ‘That makes total sense.” Lombardi has also introduced deeper, out-breaking routes to the field that disappeared from game plans late in Brees’s career — throws that might be a challenge for some quarterbacks but that Herbert can make “in his sleep,” as Staley puts it.
The Chargers staff has mined offenses like the Billsand Chiefs to find plays that only ultra-talented quarterbacks like Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Herbert can pull off. They’ve also folded in more concepts with deep, out-breaking routes to the field. It’s all part of the process that Staley envisioned when he asked Lombardi to join him in Los Angeles and try to create their own version of the QB paradise that has existed in New Orleans for so many years.
“There are branches to this house that we never had that we’re exploring, because, man, he can make throws that most mortals can’t,” Lombardi said.
Of all the lessons that McCown took from his time in New Orleans, one piece of advice has stuck with him the most. It’s a kernel of QB wisdom that he shares with his son and several other young quarterbacks that he’s coached over the years: “We don’t want you to be a robot,’” McCown said. “Robots are only programmed to do what they’re programmed to do. In a football game, quarterbacks have to adjust. Because it’s never how it was programmed.”
Over the past 15 years, the greatest strength of the New Orleans offense was the way it could adapt in real time — from game to game and moment to moment —based on what the defense presented.
Herbert says that his curriculum this offseason involved decades worth of Saints tape. Brees has stopped by Chargers practices multiple times in the past few months, and Herbert has tried to mine the wealth of systematic knowledge that resides in Brees’s brain. The most important lesson has been the way Brees could so naturally feel the game as it unfolded, as if the coverages and his responses had melded together.
“The way that he sees defenses, it’s to the point where he’s not even thinking,” Herbert said. “He’s just reacting. You can see it on film. When you watch it, it’s just, ‘OK, they’re doing this. This is what I’m gonna do.’ I think if any QB can get to that point, I think they’re set.”
Certain details about the offense will be different when filtered Herbert’s talents, but that goal — of the QB becoming one with the offense around him — is the same. By fostering a culture of honest communication and shaping the offense around Herbert’s strengths, the Chargers have tried to build a system that’s indistinguishable from the quarterback at its center.
“I think we’ve done a good job of truly creating an offense for him,” Staley said. “And one that he feels confident in each and every play. That’s what’s been fun. Because you can see it in the way he plays and how that ball comes off his hand, what his footwork and his rhythm and timing look like. I think there’s been some good signs here that would lead to believe he’s in a real comfort zone.”Comment
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KA Jersey 13 + Herbert 10 + Ty Long 1 = Open 24 hours. Ty Long at WR3!!!!!!Originally posted by Xenos View PostComment
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They're putting an awful lot on a young QB. If he can step up and master this level of system he'll be a top 3 QB this year. I expect some growing pains though.Comment
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