The Herbert Blueprint, part 2 of 3

Introduction

Writing the first part of this series was the hard part. Admitting that Justin Herbert has a ceiling, and that it sits just below the elite tier, took me longer than I would like. But the longer I looked at his limits, the less they read like a verdict and the more they read like a brief. A quarterback who needs space, legibility and time is still a quarterback teams can win with: Sam Darnold, Jimmy Garoppolo and Jared Goff have all reached the Super Bowl in offenses that supplied those things by design.

This chapter is that brief. It starts by separating coverage keys from pure progression, the two ways an offense can teach a quarterback to read, then turns to the throw that best explains why the current defensive era has been so hard on Herbert and maps what those defenses are doing to him, before setting out the offense that pays the taxes of space, legibility and time up front: what it should build on, from protection and the run game upward. It closes by looking ahead to how his skill set may fare as defenses move on from Quarters.

Coverage-Keys vs Pure Progression

Before getting to the throws, it is worth separating the two ways an offense can teach a quarterback to read a play, because the difference sits at the centre of Herbert’s season. There has been a lot of decent content produced on the topic, the best of which has come from Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner.

A Coverage-Key read , or a Full-Field Read to use Warner’s term, gives the quarterback one defender, or the rotation of the safeties, and lets that player’s movement choose the throw for them. At its simplest level; if the safety rotates down, the ball goes one way; if he stays high, it goes the other. The quarterback is still reading the defense, but only the part of it the concept is built around, and the answer arrives the moment that defender commits.

The play examples above, Pure Progression to the left and Coverage-Key to the right, shows how the quarterback is to read each route by the numbers indicated. A Pure Progression read largely takes the coverage out of the decision. The quarterback works a fixed order; first read, second, third, then the checkdown, and throws to the first receiver who is open. It is built to beat disguise, and it has become the base for much of the league, McDaniel’s Chargers included. As Mike McDaniel explained in a recent press conference;

“People have gone to pure progressions so that you don’t get sacked every play while you try to discern what coverage is after you have the ball in your hands.”

Junior J of Casual Football Fan gives these two worlds names, which helps place them in today’s NFL: traditional West Coast, built on coverage keys and used by Andy Reid, Sean Payton and the Eagles, and new school West Coast, built on pure progression and rooted in the Shanahan and McVay tree. Seen through that lens, Herbert’s three best seasons by EPA per dropback all came in offenses that taught him to read keys: Steichen’s in 2020, Lombardi’s in 2021 and Roman’s in 2024. McDaniel has taken him to the other extreme, with pure progression on almost every play, which leaves a seventh-year quarterback relearning how to read a defense mid-career.

On the face of it, building an offense for Herbert around Coverage-Keys can look like simplifying the game for a quarterback who is anything but simple, and to an extent it is. However a key-read offense is not a smaller job for Herbert so much as a different one. It asks him to process what he sees, which he does as quickly as anyone, rather than project what he cannot yet see, which is where his game seems thinnest. It still leans on his pre-snap command, which he operates with relative proficiency, but it saves the predictive load for the moments that demand it. Pure progression is not a sterner test of intelligence; it rewards system trust, anticipation and a non-visual map of the field, the traits his game seems to lack. Choosing to build an offense based on the traditional west coast principles is not a judgement on how smart he is, but a decision about which of his strengths the offense is built to use.

The dig problem

The dig route is the clearest way to show what the two-high era asks of a quarterback, and where Herbert sits in it. Against Quarters, a dig at around 15 yards lives in the vertical window between the apex defender sinking underneath it, and the capping safety above it. In terms of horizontal spacing the window exists between the numbers and the hashes. To complete it, the ball has to clear the apex defender’s reach and land before the safety closes. That calls for a layered throw: enough trajectory to get over one defender and enough speed taken off to drop in before the other.

It is the throw Herbert seems least equipped to make. His natural ball is a flat, hard line drive, which tends either to be tipped at the apex or to carry on into the safety’s break, and his hesitation on isolated digs looks like a quarterback who knows it. Less physically gifted passers such as Jared Goff and Brock Purdy make it routinely. They read the window between the two defenders, vary the pace and height of the ball, and release on anticipation, so the timing of the offense does part of the work for them. More experienced quarterbacks like Stafford and Rodgers are unafraid to make these throws with power behind them because they aim low to ensure the ball is not going to sail on them, Herbert is yet to develop the confidence needed to hit the same window due to his limitations in having a clear picture of where the defenders are underneath the throwing lane.

Offenses beat Quarters with exactly that throw. Dagger is the most commonly found structure for this: a vertical seam from the inside receiver holds or clears the near safety, the dig sits behind it, and a short grab or shallow route puts the middle defender in a high-low. The quarterback reads the underneath defender and drops the dig into the window above him. With Quarters now a base coverage, that layered dig has become a premium skill, and it is one Herbert has yet to own. Teams who can throw this route with any kind of consistency have sustained success against two-high coverages, especially on third down. In the current defensive era it is imperative to be able to attack the space underneath the safeties because it opens up the play action game by forcing linebackers to speed up their run/pass reads to drop deeper.

That is the dig as Quarters asks for it: thrown late, between the numbers and the hashes, into a window layered from above and below. It is not where Herbert does his best work on in-breaking routes. At his best he pins the ball earlier, on the numbers, right as the receiver cuts inside, with a flat, hard throw that arrives at the break before the underneath defender can settle under it or the safety can drive on it. Against Quarters that early throw tends not to be on offer, which pushes the ball back up the hashes and into the layered window he handles worst. Whether the window on the numbers opens again depends on where defenses go next, which we’ll return to at the end.

What defenses are doing to him

Modern defenses build their coverages around the very things Herbert depends on. Split-safety shells compress the intermediate layer where his line drives live and leave him few ways over it. Pre-snap two-high shells disguise the rotation until after the snap, which delays the moment a reactive thrower gets his evidence. Herbert’s cerebral abilities are quick to diagnose but it seems his predictive instincts aren’t on the same level. People often misattribute intelligence as a unilateral talent but in reality even the best amongst us are still only proficient in part. Years of experience gained with reading key defenders enabled all timers like Brady and Manning to be able to decipher an entire coverage through one small tell but that these days quarterbacks are asked to guess their way through peripheral keys.

McDaniel put it plainly in the same press conference: “Most defenses are willing to give up space and vulnerability to keeping the quarterback guessing until he has the ball in his hands.”

This is only made more complex by the way that masterminds like Mike Macdonald win with four-man rushes. His use stunts and off ball manipulations to break down protection plans rather than overwhelm them. Then simulated pressures go a step further, dropping an edge player Herbert has discounted before the snap into the window he is about to throw into. The early 2026 tape showed he was struggling with this and those mistakes has since haunted him as ghosts ever since. When the window is clean and the game is within reach he still completes hard throws but when it is not clear, he waits for miracles. The pocket rarely lasts that long, and the rescue-mode habits take over bringing game breaking mistakes with it. A forced throw is made blind or a sack taken instead of the throwaway.

What the next offense should build on

The closest Herbert has come to an offense built to his strengths is his rookie season. Shane Steichen’s 2020 offense threw on early and long-yardage downs rather than running into them, and Herbert did much of his best work from clean pockets. Drawing on Air Coryell principles, Steichen’s scheme let Herbert attack the deeper levels of the field with his elite arm: vertical stems that pushed the coverage back, timed breaks to fixed landmarks such as deep outs, comebacks and posts, and a deep defender put in a high-low. Even when things didn’t go to plan and they found themselves behind the sticks on third-and-long, Herbert used his other best abilities to extend plays and buy time for Keenan Allen and Mike Williams to adjust their routes in tandem with their young quarterback.

What it lacked was the maturity to be flexible when games tightened. Steichen’s offense always found itself short of success because of the inefficient ground game and no team that is one dimensional will be able to win one-score games with any kind of consistency. The limited playcalling and conservative game management invited teams into comebacks. This sparked the next 6 years of pontifical questions wondering what Herbert would look like with a run game. However the air attack recipe that Steichen developed is worth keeping in mind going forwards.

That said, this isn’t simply going to be a matter of hiring Shane Steichen after his inevitable departure from Indianapolis at the end of the season. Air Coryell was built for an era of more static zone defense. When defenders spot-dropped to fixed landmarks, the hole was where the play said it would be, and Herbert’s arm could still reach it even if he waited to see it. Modern defenses are built to muddy the windows of these point-and-shoot offenses: match rules and late rotation move the hole after the snap, so a landmark throw is either robbed or has to be thrown ahead of time, in the quarterback’s head. The results of that are plain to see in how far the Colts have fallen this season, and it is why the Coryell tradition is a weaker fit today despite the rookie season it produced.

The next offense should therefore use the principles of that template to pay the three taxes up front, give it an identity to hold it together, and then let Herbert’s arm convert, but each of them will need to be layered with answers to modern coverage solutions. How much of the protection and the checks Herbert is asked to own is a coaching question rather than a scheme one, so it is something we’ll touch on more when we look at the candidates.

The three pillars of what Herbert needs to thrive are Space, Legibility and Time. To setup the principles of his next offense we will explore each of those in turn to piece together what his next system should be built on.

Space

Space comes first because it is the tax Herbert’s arm can help pay for itself. For a quarterback built the way Herbert is the aim should be to earn space by using horizontal spacing via vertical routes. Make the defense cover the full width of the field so the second level has to widen, then throw into the room it leaves behind. Despite his challenges this season, two-high is not all bad news for him here. Cover 2 remains the coverage he reads and dissects best because his ability to hit sideline hole-shots stretches the safeties wider, which leaves the middle more open for crossers and sit routes.

To my eye this is where the plan for the next offensive scheme should start. Where Herbert struggles with the ball flight to the Dig window they can replicate the effect that route has by threatening wide and hitting back into the vacated spaces between the hashes and the numbers. A safety pulled wide also has further to travel to cap the sideline threat, which can lengthen the window enough for Herbert’s flatter throw to fit. Vertical pass concepts already do this successfully, but they are usually reserved for second-and-long or third down. What Herbert needs now is a talented OC who can build the same stretch into first down, without having to rely on a dominant run game to create it via play action.

Legibility

The old answer of identifying the coverage before the snap and hitting the right landmark no longer holds, as McDaniel depicts in the quote below. McDaniel is right about the problem, but as set out earlier, pure progression was not the solution for Herbert. The answer for him is to keep the discipline of pure progression without relying on the identification of the full coverage picture, and to make the post-snap answer as binary as is reasonably feasible.

“You’re hard-pressed to see guys just have shell reads because… there’s too many negative things that can happen on a pass play before the ball’s thrown if you’re taking too long to decipher that stuff.”

Every concept should ask the defense one question that a single group of defenders has to answer after the snap. Concepts should come paired, a two-high beater on one side and a one-high beater on the other, so that the first key defender to move picks the side rather than a pre-snap guess. Each progression should be keyed to the space between the seam defenders who cannot hide their post snap rotations for long. Teaching Herbert to read the space between key defenders such as the triangle between the safety, apex and hook player is the key to modernizing Coverage-Key offenses. If the space widens attack the Dig window early; if it contracts, hold the ball for a beat then hit deep.

In the modern game motion has to come late, ideally still moving at the snap. Match coverage rules cope comfortably with the kind McDaniel has favoured this season, a shift followed by a predictable motion that settles before the snap. His offense may seem complicated to the naked eye but when you run dozens formations a game defenses only have to remember one motion to predict the settled pre-snap look and from there they can trigger on the targeted gap. Late motions work against match coverages because the defense doesn’t have time to relabel its receivers. Motion that is still moving as the ball is snapped forces multiple defenders to adjust their leverage in real time, and box defenders, who cannot afford to take their eyes off the ball, are the ones most likely to lose track.

For the next version of the offense to be able to provide legibility some of the post-snap reads should belong to the receivers, through choice and option routes run by players who see the leverage first, as Allen and Williams once did. That is the Air Coryell system modernised: receivers and quarterback keying on the spacing between defenders rather than all staring at one player. Its lineage is as relevant as it is fascinating. The legendary Chargers’ coach Sid Gillman is often credited with introducing sight adjustments for his receivers, which helped change the NFL landscape in the 1960s, and coaches who learned from him or around him, among them Al Davis, Bill Walsh and Don Coryell himself, built the idea into their own schemes. In a more modern context, option routes became a focal point of the Erhardt-Perkins offense, with the slot option central to Belichick’s dynasty in New England.

Time

Time is the tax Herbert currently pays for with his body, and the team needs to acknowledge they have failed in that no matter how much capital they pretend was enough. Everything the Chargers do from here needs to place protection as its priority. That starts with coaches who have a proven record of getting the most out of their linemen, and a complete retool at both guard spots. In terms of roster building resources need to be spent on other pass protectors too, Charlie Kolar is good enough to be a TE2 but this team needs an elite blocker with enough receiving threat to be the field at all times. These rarely hit free agency so an early draft pick might have to be used on this now key position.

If the team keeps failing to cultivate a hard-nosed run game, as many teams in the league are, the toughness a good offense demands can be delivered as resilience instead: a wall for Herbert to survey the field from and deliver when the coverage inevitably breaks down. This suits the current roster too, Alt, Slater and Biadasz are the pieces to build around and that group are better pass protectors as a whole. Given them competent guards and a coach who can introduce cohesion, and they can reach a point where throwing to set up the run becomes a viable foundation.

After protection, the run game is what buys Herbert the most time. For six seasons fans and pundits alike have clamoured for one, but through misled pursuits and poor roster building the results have been no better than when Austin Ekeler and Joshua Kelley went for 3.8 yards a carry in his rookie season. The point here is not to design a run game around the current roster, but to tie whatever comes next to the play-action Herbert has thrived on, and that is the version Greg Roman was running in 2024 when Herbert was the best PA operator in the league by many measures. Sports Info Solutions described it as “mainly under-center, man/gap run schemes, with play-action”, with “55% of their runs being zone schemes, and 44% being man/gap”. That gap share ranked 5th in usage in a league that leans heavily toward zone.

Omarion Hampton fits the gap half of that split, and the reason echoes Herbert’s own game. On tape he looks most at home on gap runs from the shotgun because, like his quarterback, he is a key reader rather than a flow reader. A gap scheme gives him one gap to read, which he can scan as the ball is being handed to him before exploding off his back foot with incredible speed and power. Zone asks for something different, a read of shifting space and bodies that unfolds as the play develops, and it has never looked like the way he likes to read his keys. Roman’s heavy gap share pointed in the right direction, but injuries and subpar blocking robbed us of the chance to see it at full tilt, though I think we can all agree it looked a lot more accomplished than the current output in 2026. The challenge for the next OC is to marry the run and the pass in a way that suits all of the component parts; the most talented play callers in the league provide answers to these type of questions every Sunday so whilst roster construction needs to be evaluated I hope the Bolts’ front office start to care less about scheme fit and focus on athletic talent.

Once the run game is established, the play action game can grow from it. The threat of Justin’s legs and throw creativity pulls second-level defenders toward the line. But old-school boot principles have to be modernised, because defenses now blitz the rollout, sending an edge or a second-level player straight at the launch point before the quarterback can set. McDaniel’s answer has been the sift, a motion man coming back across to kick out the backside edge, and it has failed both schematically and in execution.

A better answer is backside insert motion. The motion man comes back inside the tackle into the B gap, and the tackle slides out to protect the launch point as Herbert comes around, so the defender most likely to meet him is taken by a lineman rather than a receiver or tight end. From there it can iterate: the motion man shows the insert and releases on a route, while a trap block from the front side seals off the backside cut lanes. It is something the Chargers have yet to adopt, and it is the kind of detail the next coordinator can focus on instead of building a complex pure progression structure in which everything depends on timing.

Beyond the run game and the boot, the dropback game still needs its own protection answers built in. Components such as shallower drops from under center that keep his tackles out of the speed rusher’s path, max-protection packages that sell run pre-snap, and quick answers to slot receivers and tight ends against simulated pressures; need to form part of the plan to buy Herbert the time he needs to run a functional offense. Personnel, coaching and scheme need to form a three layer redundancy plan because it’s clear that relying on any one of them is a path that only leads to misery by the end of the season.

The next meta: Herbert against Palms and vision-poach

Everything above is built for the defenses Herbert faces now. But defensive trends move in cycles, and the Quarters-heavy era that has punished his flat ball may already be passing. Two trends look most likely to shape the next phase: Palms-style match rules on the outside, and safeties who play off the quarterback rather than the routes. Both change the dig window we started with, and both may move the open space toward the place Herbert already throws best: on the numbers, at the break.

Palms changes the geometry of that window. The corner and safety key the second receiver: if he runs vertical, the corner stays on the outside receiver and the safety takes the vertical, while the apex defender settles rather than opening to the flat. Read that way, the corner now trails the dig as a third defender and the apex holds his ground, so the layered window between the numbers and the hashes thins from both sides. What tends to open instead is earlier and wider: the in-breaking route pinned on the numbers as the receiver cuts, before the trailing corner can recover, along with the hard, flat throw over a corner who squeezes the flat and under the safety above him, the sideline hole-shot that, as reviewed in the earlier article, is a Herbert signature.

The second trend is the vision-poach. What Cody Alexander calls “vision” safety play, and what I call vision-poach, is a backside safety who ignores the routes on his own side and reads the slot and the quarterback together, rotating to wherever the ball is about to go. The shell still shows two-high before the snap, but after it the poaching safety arrives in the intermediate middle as a robber or a backstop, so the dig window up the hashes gets busier rather than emptier. What he is least likely to reach is the throw that has already gone: the in-breaker pinned on the numbers at the break, before the receiver carries it into the poacher’s landing zone. Herbert’s release on that throw is quick enough that the safety has little time to read his eyes and get there, which blunts the very tell the vision-poach is built to exploit.

That matters for the hire. If the shift carries into Palms-style rules and the vision-poach to free up the extra rusher that has caused havoc across the league in 2026, then the premium moves from layered touch toward velocity and decisive release into windows that open early, on the numbers, and close quickly. Herbert may be better suited to that phase than to the one now ending, and the Chargers should arguably hire for where defenses are going, not for beating Quarters with a throw their quarterback rarely makes.

Conclusion: how to build an offense for Herbert

Last time out, I argued that the Chargers’ next decision is a design question before it is a talent question. This is the design. The best offense for Herbert is a spread-based, vertical passing game built on coverage keys rather than pure progression, with one clear identity and a gap-heavy run game underneath it. This kind of offense is built on protection first; finally delivering on Harbaugh’s premise of making the offensive line the tip of the spear. However instead of a Javelin built for attack the teams should put all the teams available resources into getting the personnel and coaching to act as a Pike to keep Herbert upright at any cost. Resilience becomes the weapon so that throwing to set up the run becomes a viable foundation rather than a last resort.

Its passing game earns space by threatening vertically and wide, then hitting back into the room the second level leaves behind, on first down as well as third. Every read is keyed to the space between key defenders after the snap, with paired answers to one-high and two-high, late motion that breaks match rules and receivers trusted to adjust their routes with him. The idea that this offense should is built on is that traditional West Coast and Air Coryell principles can be modernised, rather than chasing a structure in which everything depends on timing. Hampton’s gap runs from the shotgun share the same key-reading logic, and modernised boot action off under-center play-action adds a layer on top. Any honest self-assessment by the team should ensure that they stay away from anything that asks Herbert to throw before he sees, or to take speed off a ball he is built to drive.

If the league is moving from Quarters toward Palms and the vision-poach, Herbert’s flat, decisive throw on the numbers may be worth more in the next phase than it has been in this one, and a vertical, spread offense is the one most likely to put him there. A coordinator who can build to that brief whilst bringing their own identity is the going to be worth chasing in February, we’ll go looking for who that could be lnext.

Next: the play-caller he needs

The final part turns from the offense to the person who has to build it. Assistants under Harbaugh, play-callers from around the league and head coaches who may soon be back on the market will all face the same questions: does his passing game rest on coverage keys or pure progression? Can he design answers to the upcoming vision-traps which will take away Dig windows? Can they modernise the principles of traditional West Coast? The answers point away from the fashionable Shanahan-McVay-Kubiak options, toward systems that buy a quarterback time and keep his reads clean. The right hire may not be the most exciting name available, but it should be the one that finally builds around Herbert.

RW

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