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When your team has a future Hall of Fame quarterback freshly signed to a new, massive contract, it’s no surprise to hear the sound of an entire state collectively cutting the cheese when Roger Goodell announces that the Packers are trading up to draft a quarterback.
Quarterbacks drafted in the first round are, almost without exception, signposts denoting a franchise in transition. The Packers were not in transition. They were a flawed 13-win team with genuine concerns about their ceiling and an expectation for some negative regression, sure, but they were at least another year away from thinking about what many bottom feeder franchises cyclically think about – drafting the quarterback of the future.
For the purposes of brevity, I’ll just say that the reason it never made a ton of sense to draft a quarterback this season was that Rodgers’ contract disallowed the Packers to take full advantage of what would be Jordan Love’s “rookie window,” among other things.
But now the math has changed. The perception that they were one or two players away proved false. Rather, they simply needed time. In head coach Matt LaFleur’s second year, the Packers own the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs, and by both the eye tests and almost every metric, they’re a much better team. Legitimate Super Bowl contenders.
With the benefit of hindsight, the decision to draft Love looks much more like (to plagiarize my Twitter feed) Brian Gutekunst purchasing a luxury insurance policy, owning the value of the policy outright, but never ever actually receiving an invoice for it. In other words, the Packers paid what was thought to be an extremely high opportunity cost based on the reasonable position that ignoring other needs would close Rodgers’, and by extension the Packers’, Super Bowl window.
To trade up in the first round, one of an NFL franchise’s most-valuable offseason assets, and select a player you have no plans on playing, is a luxury. Frivolous is probably more apt.
Let’s take stock of the Packers post-Jordan Love acquisition: The offense? A juggernaut. The defense? Jelling at the right time. The quarterback? The likely NFL MVP. The team? The No. 1 seed with the bona fides to support it. The special teams? Well, they’re still a massively awkward pimple on an otherwise handsome face, but that’s likely true regardless of whom the Packers draft in the first round.
Either way you slice it the Packers essentially received the requisite production to make a Super Bowl run. That aforementioned opportunity cost never materialized this season. Another receiver makes them better, perhaps, but they already lead the league in points and rank fifth in yards; Justin Jefferson was never an available option. A corner would have been nice, but corners not named Jaire Alexander tend to develop slowly, and it wasn’t exactly a cornerback-rich draft class at the back end of the first round.
There’s no need to relitigate the theoretical woulda-coulda-shoulda (Michael Pittman, Chase Claypool, Laviska Shenault, et al); having a talented wide receiver in the pipeline is a valuable asset. That isn’t the argument, though. The argument was that the Packers needed year-one help to propel a flawed team and buoy a very good-but-no-longer great quarterback.
Fortunes changed for the Packers in a way Gutekunst probably couldn’t have predicted, but if he’s sitting inside the offices at 1265 with a Montgomery Burns-style grin, I don’t blame him. He rostered one of the most valuable assets a team can have, a first-round quarterback on a rookie contract, and his team still has the inside shot at a Super Bowl.
We don’t know if Love will be good, but he has a great environment in which to develop. He’s a traits-based prospect not unlike Buffalo’s Josh Allen (a legitimate MVP candidate in his third season). Not to say that Love will be Allen, but that almost doesn’t matter.
Let’s assume Rodgers plays at or near his current rate for the remainder of his contract. It would be nearly impossible to part with him, even at 40 years of age. That means Jordan Love is likely getting moved.
If he’s bad, the Packers – who have the proprietary year-over-year evaluation of the young quarterback – will have a much better sense of his value than anyone else, an advantage that has generally led to uneven quarterback trades. Josh Rosen was a bad rookie whom the Dolphins thought was worth a second-round pick. After losing the starting job to Russell Wilson, Matt Flynn was offloaded to Oakland for a fourth. Jimmy Garoppolo, who for all his limitations is a solid NFL starter, was moved for an early second-round pick even though he would require a hefty contract. Nick Foles was worth a fourth, somehow, according to Ryan Pace. And Sam Darnold? If you’re the Steelers, doesn’t a second-rounder look like the perfect gamble?
Those are just the “if he’s bad” scenarios?
If he’s good? If he looks like a legitimate top-10 NFL quarterback, the Packers can either move him for another first and roll with Rodgers on sequential short-term contracts until he retires, or they could (gasp, blasphemy!) trade Rodgers, a transaction that probably starts with a first-rounder and could likely go up depending on the market.
None of these scenarios are new; what’s new is that the Packers skirted the cost of a “wasted pick,” which, in turn, could become a boon for Gutekunst.
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