Justin Herbert’s 54-yard Hail Mary to Ladd McConkey traveled far enough to flip the game and died a yard short of the end zone anyway, and that’s the second time this season a 50-plus-yard completion from Herbert has stopped at that exact spot. Since ESPN started charting air yards in 2006, no one else has done that twice in a season. Herbert has, in a year his Chargers are 0-7.
Sunday’s version came against the Rams, down 10-9 on the final snap of the half after a botched Rams kickoff handed the Chargers one more shot. Herbert launched the ball toward a crowd near the goal line. It deflected off a Rams defender into McConkey’s hands a yard short of a touchdown that would have flipped a one-point deficit into a Chargers lead at the break.
Herbert finished the day 24-of-32 for 257 yards, zero touchdowns and two interceptions, the seventh straight game he’s thrown at least one. He leads the NFL in picks with ten. The final was Rams 24, Chargers 9.
The Chargers entered this season with the NFL’s eighth-best Super Bowl odds, coming off back-to-back 11-win seasons under Harbaugh. Seven games later, they’re barreling toward a shot at the first 0-17 finish since the schedule expanded to seventeen games in 2021.
A coincidence like that sounds like a cosmic joke until you look at what it’s actually describing. Herbert keeps throwing the pass that should win a football game, and the Chargers keep finding a different way to not finish underneath him.
It’s an NFL record, and not the kind anyone wants to hold.
https://x.com/ESPNInsights/status/2117025271216046214
Jim Harbaugh has had two separate chances this season to say something different about the staff running that offense, and he’s given the same answer both times. Coming off an 0-6 bye week, he stood by Mike McDaniel as play-caller: “We’re very confident in Mike and his talent, his work ethic and his ability. We continue to be.” After Sunday dropped the Chargers to 0-7, Harbaugh offered a version of the same answer: “We’re aware of what the issues are, and we’re the only ones that can fix them.”
McDaniel was fired as Miami’s head coach in January and hired by Harbaugh to run this offense a few months later. Seven games into that experiment, Harbaugh still refuses to change it.
I don’t buy that patience is a virtue at 0-7 with a quarterback this talented sitting in the building.
The Hail Mary record isn’t even the full indictment. Herbert has now lost fifty games since entering the league in 2020, more than any starting quarterback over that span, passing Baker Mayfield’s forty-nine. Losing that much with an arm like his says less about variance than it does about five years of coaching staffs who never built anything sturdy enough to carry him. Sunday’s Hail Mary just handed that failure a new record to point to.
