Injury Breakdown: Justin Herbert - LAC

All right, let's talk about Justin Herbert. Now, if you saw a headline right after the NFL season ended, you probably saw something like "Justin Herbert may have played most of the 2022 season with a torn labrum in his shoulder." That's the headline that you could use to justify his significant drop in yardage per game, yards per attempt, rushing production, and touchdown rate last year compared to his first two years in the NFL. But the problem is that labrum tear was on his non-throwing shoulder and likely didn't affect his play at all, outside of being a nuisance week to week from a pain management perspective.

Now, labrum tears can be significant for quarterbacks. Andrew Luck famously took a year to recover from his labrum repair on his throwing side. But non-throwing side repairs are pretty common off-season surgery for quarterbacks. Typically, guys can wait until the offseason to get this thing fixed, and then it's fixed and it doesn't really cause him an issue again. So, medically, nothing really to see here.

Now, from a fantasy perspective, the good news for Herbert is that the team did invest in the offense this offseason by drafting wide receiver Quentin Johnson in the first round of the draft, which will help if the team has the wide receiver injury luck that plagued it last season. Now, like I said, Herbert's shoulder should be good to go from a health perspective, and if the offense around him can stay healthy all year, I don't see any reason that he can't return value from a fantasy perspective. He's on my draft list.