Tag: aaron rodgers brian Gutekunst

What do the Packers actually have in Jordan Love?

If the Packers actually have to start Jordan Love in 2021, what are they getting in their 2020 first-round pick?

As the situation between Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers continues to deteriorate — Rodgers’ recent comments to ESPN’s Kenny Mayne on Mayne’s farewell SportsCenter show were rather pointed about his relationship with the front office — we’re looking at an increasing possibility that the reigning NFL MVP won’t play another down for his only NFL team without a serious paradigm shift in that front office. Rodgers has made it clear that quarterback Jordan Love, who the Packers moved up to take with the 26th overall pick in the 2020 draft, is not the specific problem. Most likely, the problem is that the Packers didn’t give Rodgers another offensive weapon with that pick, and that Rodgers wasn’t told by the team that there was a succession plan. Which, when you move up to take a quarterback in the first round, there clearly is.

If we move the ball forward in a hypothetical sense and assume that Jordan Love is the Packers’ starting quarterback when Green Bay takes the field against the Saints on Sunday, September 12, the dropoff in performance will be obvious. That’s no slight on Love; simply an acknowledgement that Rodgers is one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history, and you don’t generally replace that as easily as… well, as the Packers did when they replaced Brett Favre with Rodgers as their starting quarterback in 2008.

Rodgers was a work in progress when the Packers took him with the 24th pick in the 2005 draft, and he had three full seasons as a backup to work out the kinks. It’s probable that the Packers thought they’d have a similar ramp-up speed to get Love ready, but if they don’t, we’re left with one unclear NFL season in which Love didn’t take a single snap, and his potential based on his college performance. Love didn’t even have any preseason opportunities in 2020 because the 2020 preseason was cancelled due to COVID, so he will very much be hitting the ground in fifth gear.

Jan 21, 2020; Mobile, Alabama, USA; North quarterback Jordan Love of Utah State (5) throws during Senior Bowl practice at Ladd-Peebles Stadium. (Vasha Hunt-USA TODAY Sports)

Moreover, there’s the precipitous decline in Love’s stats from 2018 to 2019. In 2018, he was the belle of the ball, completing 64.0% of his passes for 3,567 yards, 32 touchdowns, and six interceptions. In 2019, he completed just 61.9% of his passes for 3,402 yards, 20 touchdowns, and 17 interceptions. Love’s yards per attempt dropped from 8.6 to 7.2, his Adjusted Passing Yards per attempt dropped from 9.4 to 6.4, and his passer rating dropped from 158.3 to 129.1.

We can point to the fact that Love lost his coaching staff and a lot of his weapons after the 2018 season — the Aggies were very much a team in transition in 2019. But when analyzing quarterbacks for the NFL, there’s only so far that takes you. Eventually, you have to do your best to drop the surrounding story, isolate your view of the quarterback as much as possible, and try to get a clear picture of how the quarterback projects situationally and from a traits perspective.

Why Aaron Rodgers’ Brian Gutekunst/Jerry Krause comparison is bad news for the Packers

Aaron Rodgers comparing Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst to Jerry Krause is a bad sign for the Rodgers/Packers relationship.

The schism between Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, which has been going on for years, but really started gaining steam when the team traded up to select Utah State quarterback Jordan Love in the first round of the 2020 draft and didn’t tell Rodgers about it beforehand, is getting ugly. In his recent column detailing Green Bay’s 2021 draft class, Bob McGinn of The Athletic dropped a note about Rodgers mocking general manager Brian Gutekunst by mockingly referring to him as “Jerry Krause” in group texts with his Packers teammates. Tyler Dunne of the Go Long newsletter and podcast, and someone who’s pretty connected on the Rodgers side, confirmed McGinn’s report.

The late Krause was the Chicago Bulls’ general manager from 1985 through 2003, and was a primary reason the Bulls were able to win six NBA championships. Krause was a brilliant personnel executive, but he never quite jelled with Michael Jordan, who hated some of the moves Krause made, and Krause was never able to gain the respect of the locker room.

Jerry Krause, left, general manager of the Chicago Bulls, is shown with Bulls legend Michael Jordan in this Sept. 20, 1988 photo after Jordan agreed to an eight-year contract extension. Krause, who built a team around Jordan that won six national titles, resigned Monday, April 7, 2003, citing health problems. (AP Photo/Mark Elias)

David Halberstam, who wrote brilliantly during his life about multiple sports and multiple other subjects, penned a great book about Jordan, published in 1999, entitled “Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made.” In that book, Halberstam detailed how Krause tended to over-amplify the personnel decisions he made, perhaps as an inevitable offshoot of the fact that he had to work so hard and come up so far to do what he did. And Jordan, the ultimate alpha, who did not see Krause as an alpha, would needle Krause ceaselessly when Jordan had the weight in the organization to not only get away with it, but to have Krause play along and pretend to enjoy the back-and-forth.

“What bothered some of the coaches was the fact that in the beginning, Krause seemed to enjoy this byplay, as if it finally made him one of the boys,” Halberstam wrote. “Part of the Jordan/Krause problem, however, had roots in something as old as the school yard, where some boys are popular, and some seem to be born to be targets. Jordan, gifted, talented, the best at whatever it was he chose to do, was the alpha personality, and he saw in Krause — short, unattractive, desperate to be one of the boys but lacking any of the requisite qualities — the omega personality, the person doomed to be on the outside of any group.”

This example isn’t made to specifically attribute any of Krause’s positive or negative characteristics to Gutekunst, but when the most important player on your team — the alpha — is texting stuff to his teammates comparing the general manager to an omega, it’s one more indication that the relationship between Rodgers and the Packers may be beyond repair.