GREEN BAY, Wisc.—The hotel bellman talked about it. Packers president Mark Murphy talked about it. The fans from Sarasota who come to Packers camp every year talked about it.
Did you hear that ovation for Jordan Love at Family Night?
The 70,000 fans who paid $10 to come to the annual early-camp Saturday night tradition — practice at Lambeau Field, then fireworks — gave Love a 12-second ovation when he was introduced to the crowd. It was symbolic. Packer fans were ready to move on from Brett Favre in August 2008, paving the way for first-round QB Aaron Rodgers to play. Fifteen years later to the month they’re ready to move on from Rodgers to first-rounder Jordan Love.
“The ovation was awesome, a special moment for me,” Love said. “First time that happened in Lambeau.”
Fans here got tired of Rodgers’ cat-and-mouse games with the front office, particularly after scoring a rich, all-in extension last year, then staying away from the off-season program. The new guy, great or suspect, would logically get a welcome-to-the-big-job ovation in Green Bay. It’s the way of life here. The football team is a continuum. The locals are ridiculously grateful for 30-plus years of Hall of Fame quarterbacking from Favre and Rodgers—no other fan base has been that lucky—but there’s not a lot of pining for the good old days here. Time to go. Time to move on.
On the practice field last week, Love was in command of his offense. Tackle David Bakhtiari said he’s confident and calm in the huddle. But Love has had a shaky summer. The day I saw him, he threw an easy pick to safety Darnell Savage on the first play of team period, and cornerback Jaire Alexander taunted Love after the play. Hard to imagine Rodgers making that throw — and harder to imagine Alexander taunting Rodgers after it. On other days, he’s been superb. ESPN’s Rob Demovsky charted Love as 16-of-22 with four drops or throwaways in competitive periods on day three of camp.
Watching Love, he looks fluid in the pocket. Good arm, not a rocket. Might be too quick to run, but that’s hard to tell until the real games start. I bet he’ll run lots more than Rodgers, who averaged two rushes per game in his last three years.
He had a good start in his preseason opener Friday (7 of 10, 46 yards, one TD, no picks) at Cincinnati. One play bugged me. First series, third-and-10 from the Packer 35, and rookie tight end Luke Musgrave runs a crossing route from the right to left. No one’s within five yards of him when Love releases the ball, but it’s inaccurate. Not close. And Musgrave doesn’t have a defender within six yards. Good for Love — he moved the linebackers with his eyes to get Musgrave that open. Bad for Love — he tried to Mahomes the throw. Tried to no-look-pass the ball to Musgrave and just missed by a lot. He didn’t need to. He could have focused on Musgrave a split-second earlier and still found him open enough.
I expect Love will have a shakier first year than Favre’s in 1992 (8-5, 85.3 rating) or Rodgers’ in 2008 (6-10, 93.8). Outside of the veteran backfield, Love’s skill group is incredibly green. It’s likely that each of Green Bay’s top five pass-catchers will be a product of the last two drafts: wideouts Christian Watson and Romeo Doubs (drafted in 2022) and slot receiver Jayden Reed (’23), with two rookies — Luke Musgrave and Tucker Kraft — likely to be the top tight ends. (Musgrave has had a monster camp.) Some teams skew young, but imagine Love’s dual challenges: following two Hall-of-Famers at sports’ toughest position to master, and relying on five receivers age 24, 23, 23, 22 and 22.
“We’re very young,” coach Matt LaFleur said. “I can feel it. It’s like we’re a ball of clay, and we’re trying to mold it.”
You get the feeling here that GM Brian Gutekunst is more comfortable with this way of doing business, tearing down to the studs and starting over, than his peers would be. Would Jim Irsay let GM Chris Ballard have a no-doubt rebuilding year in Indianapolis? Imagine Robert Kraft saying the same to Bill Belichick in New England?
“You talk about the continuum,” Gutekunst told me. “Going back to [GMs] Ron Wolf and Ted Thompson, I trained under them. There’s some things we believe in here—developing quarterbacks, and drafting quarterbacks to develop. We believe in allowing them to sit and learn a little bit before they have to play. It’s an organization thing. It’s the route. It’s trying to make the best decisions to win today but also understanding that there’s gonna be a tomorrow and not sacrificing that.
“We went through the Brett Favre thing. Obviously I was a road scout at the time so I wasn’t here making those decisions. I always wondered: If we had a traditional owner, we would’ve been very close to Brett I’m sure, and what would we have done [in 2008]? But I do think this place, because of what we believe in and the stability of it, is a little bit different. This place, I think, is about what’s doing right for the team each and every day. Sometimes those are complicated decisions. But no one’s ever come to me and tried to make me compromise that.”
No one said this to me on my day in camp, but as much trepidation as the team must have entering a clear rebuild, the sense is Murphy, Gutekunst and LaFleur love it. They get to wipe the slate clean and start with all-in players. That is clear. It’s also clear that the road could be potholed. The amount of teaching and learning is massive.
One granular point: the cadence. When LaFleur took the job in 2019, he came in fully intending to teach Rodgers how he wanted him to call his signals but soon asked himself, Why? “I’m not gonna tell Aaron Rodgers how to do his cadence,” LaFleur said. “He’s got one of strongest voice inflections. He’s drawn more people offside and gotten more free plays than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
The cadence is important not just in trying to draw a penalty or get a free play. Smart quarterbacks use their inflection and hard count and pauses to get a “tell” from the defense. Will the defense bring pressure? Bump the receiver or receivers? Man coverage or zone? Even if he didn’t get the defensive end to jump, Rodgers could learn so much at the line with his hutHUTTT!
“The one thing we’ve challenged him on is it’s got to sound real,” LaFleur said of Love. “It can’t be like … A lot of times I think quarterbacks get up there and they’re so worried about the offense false-starting that they don’t do it as hard or they don’t have the voice inflection at the same level as they would if they were using normal cadence. The ‘huts’ sound different. So Jordan’s is a little bit softer. That’s one thing that we’ve had to talk to him about. You’ve got to trust those other 10 guys around you that they’re not going to move.
“I mean, we never would’ve talked about that before.”
Multiply the cadence thing times 100, and you get an idea what Love’s going through. It’s not exciting, not something that’ll end up on the next season of “Quarterback” on Netflix. It is the reality of Love’s life and the Packers’ 2023 raison d’etre.
“It is a process and you’ve got to take it one day at a time,” said Love. “But I’m a worker. I’m just excited to showcase my talent on the field.”
Patience, folks.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.
