The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 86.7 overall.
Justin Herbert scored 296.94 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 326.7 — he finished 29.8 points BELOW what his own usage justified. That is a different problem from losing the job, and it is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 86.7 overall.
Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.
The largest single move was Week 10: passing TDs went down from 2 to 1.1, a 42.9% change, at 2.2 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offense collapsed. He also missed Weeks 12, 18.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a stable year. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.
He finished 17.47 points per game on 543 pass attempts — an 8% jump on his 2024 rate with LAC. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the throws he made, where they went and how far downfield they traveled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 326.7 points — 19.2 per game. He scored 29.8 FEWER than that, a 9.1% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 3,834 passing yards and 25.8 passing touchdowns, plus 425 rushing yards and 4.6 rushing touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 3,886 passing yards, 26 passing touchdowns, 555 rushing yards, 2 rushing touchdowns — against 3,834, 25.8, 425, 4.6 expected.
50% of the entire shortfall came from rushing touchdowns. He hit 43% of his expected rushing touchdowns, against 101% of his expected passing yards and 101% of his expected passing touchdowns and 131% of his expected rushing yards.
That matters because touchdowns are the least repeatable part of a scoring line. Volume and yards reflect a role; touchdowns reflect a role plus a quarterback putting the ball where it can be caught in a nine-yard window. A player who holds his catches and yards while losing five touchdowns has not lost his job — he has lost the coin flips.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Justin Herbert posted a low score on an expected total of 326.7 — 19.2 points a game of earned opportunity. The targets were still coming. What went wrong happened after the ball was in the air.
5 of his 16 games produced 25 or more points: Week 1 against KC (27.92), Week 7 against IND (27.9), Week 8 against MIN (25.28), Week 9 against TEN (27.7), Week 16 against DAL (30.2). Strip them and the remaining 11 games average 13.4.
Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 1 game came in under 10 points, including Week 11 against JAX (3.34).
The three largest overshoots — Week 16 (+10.5), Week 8 (+8.2), Week 9 (+7.2) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
1 of his 6 seasons ran hot: 2021 (+10.5%). 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2022 (-17.7%), 2025 (-9.1%). Across all 6 he has scored 46.8 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read on a down year is decline. But the direction of the miss matters: finishing BELOW expectation is the more correctable of the two errors, because the hard part — earning the volume — is the part that held.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he missed the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 89 graded prop lines, he has gone over 50.6% of the time. On passing yards specifically the number is 46.9% across 32 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 0.2%.
That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied an 18.6% rate and he converted at 12.5% — a gap of -6.1 points, which is worth noting.
Across 1,151 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. team implied total (r 0.146) carry.
So the figures worth weighing for him: 543 pass attempts, 2.85 passing EPA, 7.8 air yards per attempt. He was pressured on 29.8% of dropbacks, and put 76.4% of throws on target. He carried it 93 times, taking 14.7% of his team’s goal-line carries — the only replicated floor factor at the position.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 104 games, LAC has come in -0.45 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 46% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offense performs about where the market expects, so there is no environment bonus or penalty to apply to him either way.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 351.5 points, 20.9 per game across 16.8 expected games — 4,516 passing yards, 28.8 passing touchdowns, 481 rushing yards, 2.9 rushing touchdowns. That is QB2, 73 overall, and 30 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
the real offensive-line and personnel upgrade (a much healthier line, a new, well-regarded OC replacing the previous one) is treated as a bigger deal than public perception currently reflects. Already has a 5,000-yard passing season on his resume coming off one of the worst statistical situations of his career (historically bad line, best weapons not healthy simultaneously) — meaning a return to full health/support has real, provable precedent for his ceiling.
The books do not agree on him. Justin Herbert is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~68, ESPN lets him slide to ~110 (41.7-pick gap). That 41.7-pick gap between Yahoo and ESPN is the practical thing to act on: in a ESPN-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 86.7 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 41.7 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 83.6, espn 109.6, yahoo 67.9, underdog 83, cbs 85.8.
He goes at 86.7 and our board has him 73. That is 13.7 picks of discount on a QB2 projection — you are getting the QB2 outcome at a price the room has set below it.
The case for: a 34% boom rate; 93 carries of his own, and rushing is the only quarterback signal that survived testing.
The case against: a floor of 16.7 points per game, which is the outcome you are underwriting if the role moves.
The call: take him at his ADP and do not talk yourself out of it.
Ask the Coach about Justin Herbert Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 89 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.