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.
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.