Roman Britain is lousy with curse tablets. Archaeologists call them defixiones — thin sheets of lead, scratched with the name of a rival or a thief or an ex-lover, folded shut, and dropped into a sacred spring with an explicit request to the gods: make their eyes fail, make their limbs seize, make them suffer until the wrong is undone. I learned about these in a context that had nothing to do with the Los Angeles Chargers, and yet here I am, watching Justin Herbert’s team sit at 0-5, and a fanbase performing something close to the same ritual with an iPhone video and his fiancée’s hands in his hair.
The Chargers are 0-5 for the first time since 2003, and the only undefeated team left in the AFC is coming to town this weekend. Somewhere between Arizona and Denver, the explanation for that collapse stopped being Herbert’s seven interceptions or a defense that can’t get off the field in a two-minute drill. It started being Madison Beer.
This isn’t new. It’s escalation. The last time Chargers fans blamed Herbert’s fiancée for a bad week, the record was only 0-2, and the mechanism was simpler: a fanbase needing somewhere to put a feeling it couldn’t aim at a coordinator or a cornerback rotation. Three losses later, that free-floating resentment has hardened into something closer to doctrine. What the discourse reveals now isn’t just that fans need someone to blame for the losing. It’s that they’d rather believe in a curse than sit with how boring the actual explanation is.
The video at the center of it is from August, during training camp: Herbert on the grass, Beer running her hands through his hair, the same training-camp clip that set off the original round of PDA discourse back when the record was still 0-0 and everyone had the luxury of being annoyed for sport. Barstool Sports reposted it this week with a caption that did the work for everyone:
https://twitter.com/barstoolsports/status/2109423473281937754
Within hours the replies had reorganized themselves into something close to folklore. One fan wrote that Beer is “worse than the Madden curse, because being hurt by Madden sucks, but skills still exist.” Another, more charitably, diagnosed Herbert as a man so smitten he’d lost the plot entirely. A third said the video “needs to be studied like a curse tablet” because Chargers fans “did nothing to deserve this timeline.” I find this funny. I also think it’s doing a lot of quiet work to avoid saying the obvious sentence out loud: we are mad at our quarterback and we don’t know who else to be mad at.
The hair-touching clip wasn’t even the ugliest version of this. At the October 4th game against Seattle, a 30-23 loss after the Chargers trailed 20-6 at half, the one that made it 0-4 before it was 0-5, a fan near the tunnel caught Herbert on a bystander’s video as he walked off: “Hey, Herbert! Herbert! Two meatball subs, man. You’re just as bad as your girl!” It’s an insult and a backhanded compliment stacked in the same breath — he’s bad, but at least he’s dating someone worth remarking on.
My brother sends me Chargers highlights with zero context, just a clip and nothing else, like he’s filing a report from a war I’m not fighting. He sent one the night of the Seattle game. I didn’t need the caption to know what it meant.
Here’s what nobody doing the curse-tablet bit is checking: the timeline. Herbert and Beer announced their engagement on July 28th, the day before he reported to camp. Here’s that post, still live:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DbV8JJoFN2Y/
She was around for all of last season, too, when the Chargers went 11-6 and made the playoffs with Herbert playing some of the best football of his career. The relationship predates the good year and the bad one. If it were actually load-bearing, you’d expect it to show up somewhere other than exactly the five weeks everyone decided to notice it.
It isn’t showing up in his mechanics, either. Herbert has thrown seven interceptions against five touchdowns through five games, and not one outlet covering this team seriously has connected that to anything other than an offensive line that can’t protect him and a scheme that isn’t getting the ball out on time. Nobody with a press credential is pinning a 0-5 start on his fiancée. That’s a fan-made product, built and distributed entirely on the internet.
Beer, for her part, has kept posting like none of it touches her. This one’s from earlier in the week:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DefC3UJmWZL/
It has nothing to do with football, 1.2 million likes, a life running in parallel to a discourse that has nothing to do with her actual life. That’s either the healthiest response available to her or the only one, and I’m not sure those are different things.
I don’t think the people calling this a curse believe it, not literally. I think they already know what’s wrong with the Chargers’ offensive line and find it easier to post about a woman’s hair than explain pass protection to a stranger online. Whether that’s a failure of analysis or just a more honest kind of fandom than anyone wants to admit to, I keep going back and forth on, and I’m in no hurry to land somewhere.
