Will Jordan Love Mark the End of the QB Start-Vs.-Sit Debate, or the Start of a New Era?

When you win in Green Bay, they name a street after you. Heading down Lombardi Avenue to Lambeau Field, you’ll cross over a Bart Starr Drive and a Brett Favre Pass—and perhaps one day, after the dust has settled on this past offseason, Aaron Rodgers will get a street of his own. The city treats its quarterbacks like gods, which has its benefits. But the fan base has also spent the past 30 years watching Favre and Rodgers stack up wins and MVP awards, so the standard for what constitutes good quarterback play may be a little warped.

That puts a lot of pressure on Jordan Love, who, after spending the first three years of his career on the bench, is finally taking over as the team’s starter. But if the Packers are worried about their succession plan, they’re damn good at hiding it. In the locker room, there’s a palpable feeling of excitement for Love—and an air of confidence. Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon told me that stems from watching Love work on his game tirelessly and from his relentless positivity. “That makes people want to work hard for him,” said Dillon. “It makes people want to block for him and to see him succeed.”

Green Bay’s running backs have seen the work Love has put in behind the scenes, but the rest of us largely have not. Nor have we seen much of him on an actual football field. Love’s 90 dropbacks through the first three years of his career rank last among first-round quarterbacks drafted since 2011, per TruMedia. Even Trey Lance, whose limited tenure with the 49ers sparked a recent debate over the viability of developing a raw QB on the bench, has him beaten by 33 plays over one fewer season. The failure of the Lance experiment was mostly the product of rotten timing and bad luck—the untested prospect was always going to wait at least a year to get his chance at the helm, and when that chance came, an ankle fracture ruined it. But if the fact that the 49ers cut ties with him this summer caused any front offices to swear off prospects who may require a “sit and learn” model, then Love could be the one who wins them back.

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen that model work. Patrick Mahomes, the best example from the last decade, didn’t start right away, but he probably could have, and he was on the bench for only a year. The last time we saw this function the way the Packers are going about it, with a QB spending multiple years learning from the sideline, was about 15 years ago, before this very team said Enjoy pretend retirement, Brett and tossed the keys to the franchise over to Rodgers. When you go through the last few decades of NFL history, Green Bay is the only franchise that’s been able to consistently churn out productive quarterbacks from the bench. During Favre’s long tenure as starter, the Packers played a part in the early development of several quarterbacks who went on to lead other franchises to the playoffs, including Mark Brunnell, Aaron Brooks, and Matt Hasselbeck.

That isn’t by accident, said Hasselbeck, who, like Love, spent the first three years of his career sitting behind a future Hall of Famer in Green Bay. Hasselbeck said then–Packers president Ron Wolf went out of his way to invest in the quarterback position, drafting one almost every year and taking fliers on veteran reclamation projects. Wolf referred to it as the “Packer Way.”

This version of the Packer Way, under a new coaching staff and new front office, has presented plenty of challenges—for both the team and Love. No first-round-drafted quarterback in the modern NFL has spent more time on the bench, and that’s “been hard,” Love told me in the Packers locker room after a training camp practice. “During training camp, you’re getting reps. But in season, as a backup, you’re mostly getting scout team reps. You have to do a lot of mental reps.”

Mental reps can be productive, but they’re also impossible to evaluate, which is why nobody outside the organization knows what to expect out of Green Bay’s offense this season or out of the 24-year-old who’ll lead it. Maybe Love will be next in the lineage of great Packers quarterbacks. Maybe he won’t. Either way, he’ll be a lightning rod for the future of the start-vs.-sit debate, around the NFL and especially in Green Bay.

The Packer Way has always been a little controversial—especially when the team drafted Love with the 26th pick in the 2020 draft. At that time, Green Bay was coming off a 13-3 season, an NFC championship game loss to San Francisco, and a realization that the team probably needed more top-tier wide receivers if it was going to appease an unsettled Rodgers. Instead, the Packers picked Love.

But the method goes back much further than that. During Favre’s tenure, the team never got much use out of its variety of quarterback backups—Favre is the NFL’s record holder for consecutive games played (321), after all. But Wolf continued the process, eventually flipping a few of those quarterbacks for draft picks. Hasselbeck had taken 19 regular-season dropbacks when Seattle swapped first-round picks with Green Bay and threw in a third rounder in a trade for him. Hasselbeck had originally been taken in the sixth round.

Wolf’s hoarding of quarterbacks was one of two keys to Green Bay’s quarterback factory, according to Hasselbeck. The other was a commitment to equal-opportunity coaching by the staff, which isn’t always the norm. “I see a lot of stuff on Twitter these days,” Hasselbeck said, “where you see these entitled veteran coaches [who] are saying, ‘Well, here’s our philosophy: If your starter goes down, you’re not going to be any good anyway.’”

Hasselbeck was referring to the famous line by former Colts offensive coordinator Tom Moore, who explained that Peyton Manning’s backups didn’t get reps because “if 18 goes down, we’re fucked. And we don’t practice fucked.” It’s a great quote, but it’s easy to see how it could stunt a backup quarterback’s growth.

“That’s like cold water splashing on my face when I hear that,” Hasselbeck continued. “What a defeatist attitude or thing to say. That was never the case in Green Bay with any of the coaches that I was there with.”

Every Packers QB on the depth chart was coached the same, Hasselbeck said, even the three-time MVP. “The standard was the standard,” said Hasselbeck. That’s a phrase that gets thrown around every locker room, but in Green Bay in the late ’90s, it meant that the expectations for the all-world passer at the top of the depth chart were the same as those for the sixth-round pick at the bottom of it. When the backup QB went with the first teamers in practice or in a preseason game, they ran the same plays Favre would and were expected to execute them the same way. Hasselbeck had hardly played any meaningful football when Seattle made him its starter, but Green Bay’s rigorous coaching prepared him for the role.

The descriptions of Hasselbeck’s early education sound a lot like what I had heard from current members of the Packers last month about Love’s behind-the-scenes development. Second-year offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich told me there’d been an effort to make Love’s scout team reps as close to gamelike situations as possible. “So all those reps, he’d be seeing things that he’d see in a game,” Stenavich said. “So then you’re not just taking reps for the sake of it, or just to help out your defense. You’re actually getting better.”

Green Bay has also gotten Love reps whenever it’s been in a blowout over the last two seasons. Any opportunity to get Love on tape, which he could then study to find areas of improvement. One of the first things Love went to work on was his footwork on under-center dropbacks, something he’d have to master if he was going to play in Matt LaFleur’s offense.

“It needed a lot of work,” Love said. “It was sloppy at first. But through all those repetitions, throughout the four years I’ve been here, it’s been a work in progress and now I’m confident. It feels natural.”

Love would watch footage of his drops in practice and during preseason games, looking for ways to clean them up and do a better job timing his drops with the routes his receivers were running. This wasn’t something he was asked to do at Utah State, which operated out of the gun exclusively. And that timing and footwork are easy to take for granted. But just getting to the point where Love could take a dropback required time and work.

With that base in place, Love added layers to his game. During the 2021 preseason, you could see flashes of his talented arm, but he was still raw as a passer. In 2022, when the Packers gave him more than 70 preseason dropbacks, you saw him grow more comfortable in the pocket and more consistent in his accuracy.

“You could just see that he progressed every year,” Stenavich said. “[He] got a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better.”

The coaches had seen it in practice, but Love still had to prove he could do it in a competitive game. He got that chance in late November, against the undefeated Eagles and their record-setting pass rush, in front of a national audience on Sunday Night Football, after Rodgers went down with an oblique injury. I’m getting overwhelmed just typing it all out. But Love was unaffected by the stakes, and the coaching staff didn’t coddle him as if he were a raw quarterback in a hostile atmosphere. The Packers had Love ripping passes all over the field. There were hole shots, no-look throws, and off-platform strikes.

The Packers lost the game 40-33, but Love led two scoring drives and kept them in it. More important, he had shown the coaches they had something in their young quarterback.

“You saw a guy come in there, against a very good team, on the road, and play with confidence,” Stenavich told me during a post-practice walk last week. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, [he can play], and you could see his work was paying off.”

Love considers his cameo in Philly his first time playing in “crunch time” at the pro level. He doesn’t include the first and only start of his career thus far, which came in 2021 after Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 four days before a trip to play the Chiefs. Kansas City’s defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo welcomed Love to the league by blitzing him on over 50 percent of his dropbacks, and the young QB didn’t have an answer. He averaged 1.9 yards per dropback when the Chiefs sent five or more pass rushers, so Spagnuolo kept sending them. Love led just one touchdown drive in a miserable 13-7 loss.

It was a forgettable performance for Love, but a valuable learning experience. “I learned if you don’t make them pay, defenses are just going to keep doing what’s working until you do,” he said.

The Love we saw in that game hardly resembles the one we saw against the Eagles. More encouragingly, that Love bears no resemblance to the one we’ve seen over the past month, during his first preseason as the team’s full-time starter.

Love has been a much more decisive quarterback this summer. The ball is getting out as soon as he hits the back of his drop—a big point of emphasis for him during the offseason. His feet have been calmer in the pocket, which has helped keep his mechanics in order. That has cut down on some of the high misses that used to be all over his film. To Stenavich, it’s just another step in Love’s progress, which seems to have picked up speed over the last year. “With him, it was throwing with anticipation and then footwork. You could see him gradually clean things up [with his feet] so he was throwing on time.”

Love’s very first dropback of preseason play, in a game against the Bengals, is a good example of this. He took the snap, quickly read the defense, and recognized that the corner was in position to break on the slant route at the top of the screen. So he hit Aaron Jones in the flat. Both he and Stenavich agreed it wasn’t a play he was making a year ago. At least not as efficiently as he did this time. And it’s an example of another aspect Love has been working on—ball placement, to give his receivers a better shot at picking up yards after the catch.

Love said that in past years he might have led Jones out of bounds or forced him to adjust to the ball rather than turning upfield with it. There is plenty of on-film evidence to back that up. But just because those were bad throws doesn’t mean they weren’t useful for Love. “Through those reps you can start to feel those things,” he said. “You figure out where you have to hit guys, so they can keep running and pick up more YAC.”

Those small things add up. Love is certainly capable of making all the blue-chip throws that get you drafted in the first round. We’ve seen plenty of that. But it will be his capacity to get this small stuff right—snap after snap—that will dictate his future in Green Bay.

That’s where Hasselbeck said he grew the most thanks to watching Favre in practice. And it looks like watching Rodgers all those years may have had the same effect for Love. Stenavich said his young quarterback has it all down—from getting the team in and out of the huddle to nailing all of the pre-snap adjustments and protection calls. Jones, who spends a lot of time in the backfield with Love before the snap, said the young quarterback has always been competent before the snap but has taken even more ownership over those skills this offseason.

The word “confidence” came up a lot during my time in Green Bay. Maybe the team is trying to convince itself that everything will work out well this season, but it’s important to remember that the Packers were the ones who decided to move on from Rodgers—not the other way around. Rodgers made that clear when he first announced his desire to play for the Jets. A few weeks before that announcement, team president Mark Murphy told a local news outlet that Rodgers would start for the Packers in 2023 only “if things don’t work out the way we want.”

Then, Murphy put his salary cap space where his mouth was, trading Rodgers to New York for a modest package—contingent on how many snaps the 40-year-old quarterback plays for his new team—while eating a $40 million dead cap hit. The front office also committed to Love through 2024 by inking a one-year extension worth up to $22.5 million. Green Bay could move on after this season, but it would have to take on a $12 million dead cap charge to cut him. Trading him would save about $5.5 million but leave the Packers with a dead cap charge of $7 million. Barring a complete disaster this season, Love will be back in Green Bay in 2024.

This is the first quarterback LaFleur and Co. have been able to mold with their philosophy in mind. And while Stenavich said the offense won’t change much now that Love is taking over—maybe less shotgun, which the 6-foot-2 Rodgers always preferred to help him see what was unfolding over the middle of the field, and fewer RPOs on early downs—the coordinator’s big focus this offseason was “marrying the run and the pass” so that their concepts look more alike. The Packers have also been making good use of Love’s mobility in the preseason, getting him outside the pocket on designed rollouts to both his left and right. As Rodgers lost mobility in 2022, Green Bay called fewer of those plays, which had been a big part of the offense in 2020 and 2021, when the old man could still do stuff like this:

But as mapped out as this transition from Rodgers to Love has been, this isn’t a thing teams do very often—and that applies to every step of the ongoing four-year process. They don’t push top-10 quarterbacks out the door. They don’t draft a quarterback in the first round and stash him on the bench for three years. And for good reason: Moves like that rarely work out for the team. At least not anymore.

There are a number of explanations for that. The rookie wage scale implemented in 2011 made it easier for teams to surround highly drafted rookies with more talent. And once franchises realized that a productive starting QB on a rookie deal was a roster-building cheat code, the prospects who needed some time to develop fell further out of favor. Then there are the teams who already have a franchise quarterback taking up a big chunk of the cap and who use the first round to land cheap premium talent that can help them win now. Passing on an opportunity to do that for Rodgers in 2020, only to draft his replacement instead, nearly sabotaged Green Bay’s relationship with its star quarterback. The Packers seem to feel good about that decision now, but there have certainly been moments when it looked like a massive blunder for a team competing for Super Bowls.

When I asked Hasselbeck, whose career spanned from those old days to the new era of plug-and-play rookie quarterbacks, why teams went away from the “sit and learn” model, he drew on his own experience from his time in Tennessee. “[It’s] 100 percent peer pressure,” Hasselbeck said. He said the Titans coaches felt pressure to get Jake Locker, a first-round pick in 2011, on the field earlier than he was ready because other teams had managed to get their young passers playing well.

“Guys like Andrew Luck and Andy Dalton were having great years,” said Hasselbeck. “And the talk from ownership in the media was ‘Well, they’re young guys. They’re the same age or younger. Your guy should be out there like that.’

“Some people don’t believe in their own convictions strong enough, and they’re always looking around.”

The Packers cannot be accused of that. And they certainly cannot be accused of succumbing to peer pressure. I don’t know whether any other organization would have developed Love in the way that Green Bay has over the last four years. But if the modern version of the Packer Way produces another franchise quarterback, maybe even one worthy of having a street named after him one day, that will change quickly.