Los Angeles Chargers QB Justin Herbert Has His Head in The Game

Justin Herbert can afford all the eggs he wants. He just doesn't want to buy any.

Back in the summer of 2023 he signed a contract extension with the Los Angeles Chargers that pays him more than $50 million per year. That doesn’t mean the 27-year-old quarterback is out there blowing money.  When he’s at his home outside Eugene, Ore., Herbert likes a big breakfast. So he’ll make eggs laid by the chickens that live on his property. “My brothers and I go down there and get 10 eggs a day,” Herbert says. “It’s pretty cool, and we don’t have to go to the store to get any more eggs.” 

The chickens are just part of the wildlife menagerie that Herbert has on his property. There are goats, pigs, and bees. (Yes, he has one of those suits that beekeepers wear.) He’s always been mesmerized by nature. His grandfather and father were both biology teachers. “We’d be hanging out in the yard, exploring, you know, looking at insects, snakes, things like that,” Herbert says. “Life was always so interesting.” 

When he got to college at the University of Herbert wasn’t banking on a football career. He was planning on becoming a doctor, so he majored in biology and was so knowledgeable that he was actually a teaching assistant in one of the hardest classes on campus: “It was Biology 212—organisms. It was explaining how cells work together in our daily life—how we breathe, to how organisms work,” he says. 

Then a funny thing happened. His football career took off. In high school, Herbert had been more focused on baseball. (And fishing; he and some pals started an angling club at Sheldon High that got upwards of 70 members.) A broken leg slowed his recruitment, so he went to Oregon as a relatively unheralded prospect. 

By the middle of his freshman season he was starting, and when his senior season rolled around (Herbert stayed in school all four years), he was one of the most highly touted QBs in the country. He attributes some of that success to the lessons learned in biology—how bodies work together. 

“It all goes back to making things make sense,” Herbert explains. “If you really understand how one thing affects the other, and if this affects that, you can go down this line of, this is what’s going to happen with this protein. 

“And with defenses, it’s the same way. If you’re looking at coverages—if this guy’s standing here and he’s got this zone, well, this guy must have this one—you can go down that path. If you’re getting certain pressures, you understand that guys have to be covering certain zones. Learning how to study— that’s really important in football.” 

Not every quarterback in the NFL compares defenses to proteins, but maybe more should: To Chargers’s opponents, Herbert is something of an evil genius. In his five seasons with the Chargers, Herbert has averaged more than 4,000 yards a season. Last year, his first under coach Jim Harbaugh, Herbert threw for 3,870 yards with just three interceptions. Los Angeles went 11–6, its best record since 2018. 

But the season came to an abrupt end in the wild-card round of the playoffs, when Herbert was uncharacteristically intercepted four times in a loss to the Texans. There’s no denying, however, that the team is in a great place under Harbaugh, who inherited a team that won just five games in 2023. “The margins in the NFL are so razor thin that those slight changes make a huge difference,” says Herbert. “Where we were a couple years ago, it doesn’t seem like we were that far off, but all those little tiny details that Coach Harbaugh [emphasizes], it adds up over time.” (How detail-oriented is Harbaugh? At his introductory press conference he raved about how excited he was to go to Home Depot to buy a vacuum for the team’s weight room.) 

Herbert hasn’t beaten himself up over the playoff defeat. Instead, he went home to Oregon, worked out and spent some time reflecting—and caring for his brood. “Just took care of some farm animals, played some football and worked out,” he says. “I think that was important for me, especially after a tough year—bouncing back and taking some time off to go enjoy things outside of football and then come back when it’s time to go and get ready to get after it.”