Ladies and gentlemen, Playoff Football has arrived! The Chargers will travel to Foxborough looking to take home their first playoff win of the Justin Herbert era.

Today’s Hottest Take: Justin Herbert Will Outduel the MVP

Deservedly so, a lot of the talk surrounding this game is Drake Maye–the MVP front-runner–againsy Justin Herbert. Of course the game boils down to much more than just the two #10s dueling it out on Sunday Night Football, but it doesn’t change the fact that whichever QB walks away from this one with a playoff L will be leaving with a heavy dose of slander. The MVP front-runner who faced criticism for a soft schedule, dropping a home playoff game to a seventh-seed to go one and done? Won’t go over well amongst the public.

And as stated by Jim Harbaugh, it’s put up or shut up time, particularly for Justin Herbert, come playoff time. Is it fair for either of these two? Not necessarily, Maye is a second-year player exceeding early expectations, and Herbert is by all accounts the only reason the Chargers are sniffing playoff football in the first place, despite historically bad circumstances surrounding him. This is the nature of the beast when discussing the quarterback position.

With all of that said, there will come a time when Herbert or Maye have the game in their hands, as that is also the nature of the beast being QB1 for an NFL franchise. I’m here to tell you that the gunslinger out of Oregon is going to shake up the AFC playoff picture early, and he’s going to outplay the MVP while doing it.

Now, as I said earlier, there’s more to this football game than just this QB matchup. And one of the reasons that Justin will win this duel is the play of Jesse Minter’s defense. No one quite puts a lid on the big play like Minter’s squad (except for approximately five minutes in Week 17), and New England’s offense is highly predicated on the big play. Averaging a league-best 6.2 yards per play, they’ve done a sensational job riding the Drake Maye deep ball to 14-3; I think they’ll have much more trouble exploiting Sunday Night. With Denzel Perryman returning from suspension, and actually having the rest advantage over the higher seed, the increasingly physical front seven of the Bolts are more than capable of holding their own on the line of scrimmage against a good Patriots run game (4.4 yards per carry), and if the Chargers can get the Patriots into passing situations, they can take advantage of a pass game that has a 24th-ranked sack percentage allowed (7.83%), a weakness compounded by Drake Maye’s willingness to scramble, and desire to push the ball downfield.

All the credit in the world to Drake “Drake Maye” Maye, but in the 2025-2026 campaign, only one QB stood head and shoulders above all in primetime. Justin Herbert, now in Year 6, is ready for his close-up. Going 5-0 in primetime games this season, he now gets the biggest stage of his career, once again on Sunday Night Football in the playoffs, and despite all of the shortcomings in the past, despite all of the hardships of this season, I’m backing Justin Herbert to silence the doubters and shock New England in the process.

What You Need to Know: Patriots Pass Rush vs Chargers Pass Protection

Ok, here goes. To make this extremely simple, if the Chargers can protect Justin Herbert, they can genuinely beat any team on any day. The bad news? They haven’t been able to do that pretty much the entire season.

The good news! Justin Herbert is a cyborg, and the Chargers won 11 games anyway!

But the regular season is over, and now the eyes shift to the daunting pass rushes that the playoffs have to offer… except New England isn’t exactly one of those pass rushes. Ranked 20th in Pass Rush Win Rate (35%), the Patriots rank worse than a Dallas Cowboys team that the Chargers put up their first sack shutout of the season against. Now major free-agent pickups Harold Landry and Milton Williams have been in and out of the lineup, with the former still holding a questionable tag thus far into the week after missing the last two games, so there’s reason to believe there’s some untapped potential in the pass rush of New England, but the smart money is to still bet on this being the weakest pass rush the Chargers have seen this far next to Dallas.

If Jamaree Salyer is healthy and back to protect Herbert’s blindside, there’s reason to be optimistic about the Chargers ability to protect #10, and if they do, we’ve seen that Justin Herbert is capable of dicing up even the best of secondaries. With all of that said, all eyes should go to the trenches and how they hold up early.

Before You Go: Exorcising Demons

Marlon McCree, 2007, Ladainian Tomlinson sitting solemnly on the bench with the helmet on, the Pats storming Qualcomm, doing Shawne Merriman’s signature “lights out” dance, taunting a heartbroken fanbase, steamrolling the best Chargers team in recent history in 2018. The New England Patriots have been where Chargers football has gone to roll over and die since I was a literal toddler. Not to forget, still fresh in our minds is Justin Herbert’s four-interception blowup last time this team played postseason football. And since I already triggered every Chargers fan reading, remember the last time the Bolts manned the Sunday Night Football slot on Wild Card Weekend? 27-0.

The point is, historically, the Chargers invent ways to break the hearts of their fanbase in matchups exactly like this one. If Coach Harbaugh and Justin Herbert want to prove that this is not the Same Ol’ Chargers, on Sunday Night, they must exorcise the demons left behind by all of those heart-shattering playoff losses to New England, the third-largest choke in postseason history, and the worst performance in the career of Justin Herbert.