More from the MMQB: Recapping Sunday’s games | Playoff picture | What we learned | Goff for MVP | Rodgers, Wilson paths
On Thursday, it’ll have been precisely a year and a half since the Green Bay Packers agreed to trade Aaron Rodgers to the New York Jets for a package yielding two second-round picks and a first-round pick swap. At the time, it seemed like a fair compromise after a couple months of negotiations dragged along.
Now? It looks like the Packers made off like bandits.
That has little to do with Aaron Rodgers’s Achilles injury in Week 1 of last year, or the Jets’ 2–5 start this year. Nor is it even about the players the Packers selected with the picks. First-rounder Lukas Van Ness and second-rounder Edgerrin Cooper dressed as reserves Sunday, and second-rounder Luke Musgrave just landed on injured reserve.
But it’s actually simpler than that. The trade made way for Jordan Love, and a crew of young guys around him, and that’s more than enough to make it a win for Green Bay.
Sunday wasn’t perfect, but it proved that, emphatically, again. The Packers beat a really good Houston Texans team, 24–22, and did it despite Love throwing a couple of first-half picks, Green Bay losing the turnover battle 3–0 and the defense allowing 142 yards on the ground. The Packers did it with the resilience they showed earlier in the year, riding out Jordan Love’s knee injury, and with the steadiness Love has shown since getting the job.
A few minutes after Love orchestrated an eight-play, 44-yard drive to set up Brandon McManus’s game-winning 45-yard field goal, the 25-year-old quarterback had a minute to process how his team had survived a slugfest with another team on the way up. More so, he pushed the conversation to what it showed about the group assembled around him.
“That’s the trust, chemistry,” he told me over the phone from the bowels of Lambeau Field. “It really is those guys making plays.”
Those plays were exciting for everyone at Lambeau, but even more exciting, though, is what could be to come.
We’re wrapping up Week 7, and we’re covering the whole weekend, so over in the takeaways, you’ll find …
• The case for Jared Goff being in the MVP race.
• How the Kansas City Chiefs have become what the New England Patriots used to be.
• Marcus Mariota on what the Washington Commanders are becoming.
• The Cleveland Browns’ future and Pittsburgh Steelers’ present at quarterback.
But we’re starting with a Packers team that’s become incredibly young, exciting and dangerous around its young star quarterback as we approach midseason.
People in Green Bay are careful about saying it publicly, but moving on from Rodgers was about more than just Love’s readiness, though the strides Love made in the shadows in 2022 were a big component. It was also about turning the page on an era, with aging guys Rodgers was tethered to (and rightfully so) on the way out. David Bakhtiari, Randall Cobb and Robert Tonyan are all gone, and Davante Adams was the year before Rodgers left.
In their place was a raft of young players with plenty to prove, all of them homegrown.
In 2022, the Packers drafted receivers Christian Watson and Romeo Doubs, and tackles Rasheed Walker and Zach Tom. In ’23, they picked tight ends Tucker Kraft and Musgrave, and receivers Jayden Reed and Dontayvion Wicks. From that group came the team’s starting tackles on Sunday, and five of its six leading receivers, and that’s with Musgrave hurt.
Even better, with the Band-Aid ripped off on the Rodgers crew, these guys are growing together with Love, who’s taken a critical role in their development, both on the practice field and, now, on game day.
“There’s definitely a lot of love, that whole group, the receivers, the tight ends, everybody on offense,” Love says. “There’s a lot of love and trust in that group. We’re all younger guys that worked our way into this position of being here. We’ve done a great job of sticking together, building that chemistry and trust. I think we’ve got a really great group that can build and grow together. I’m excited about the guys we have.
“We’ve very deep in the receiver room and the tight end room with playmakers that just go out there and make plays when the ball comes their way.”
And that showed up early against a similarly constructed Houston team.
It was first with perhaps Love’s most physically impressive throw of the day. On the fourth snap of the second quarter, he fired a bullet just over the head of linebacker Neville Hewitt and just inside safety Caden Bullock—through a window that looked about as wide as a credit card—to a diving Kraft in the back of the end zone to put Green Bay up 7–3. It was arm talent, but it was also trust that Kraft could get to it.
Then, on the Packers’ next possession, Love showed his command in rushing the team to the line, after the officials ruled what might’ve been (but probably wasn’t) a lateral to Reed and subsequent turnover an incomplete pass. Matt LaFleur got the call in. Love got the offense set. And then, the quarterback dropped one in the bucket to Wicks for a 30-yard touchdown.
“Tuck, a guy jumping in front of the throw, almost getting his hands on it, his ability to focus on the ball and finish it in the end zone was big-time,” Love says. “Wicks, that’s me just trusting him and putting one down the sideline for him, and trying to keep it over the outside shoulder and him doing a great job finishing in the end zone. The trust, the chemistry, all those things play factors in both of those plays.”
And they’d need that trust and chemistry again—including the control Love showed in setting up the Wicks touchdown—when it mattered most.
Over the summer, LaFleur and Love told me, in separate conversations, that the biggest step Love was taking was coming in the two-minute drill. The coach wanted to get the quarterback to the point where he could call the offense from the line. The Packers wouldn’t pull on that lever all the time, but everyone, Love included, would benefit from his ability to do it.
Green Bay struggled in that area in Love’s first year as a starter, and the season actually ended in the divisional round in San Francisco on one such failure—where Love tried to do a little too much, and threw a ball across his body that was intercepted by Dre Greenlaw to salt away the 49ers’ 24–21 win.
“We spent a lot of time trying to focus on and improve on that,” Love says about running the two-minute offense. “It wasn’t great last year. We had some chances and came up short. So it’s definitely been a big focus for us.”
That focus paid dividends on the Packers’ game-winning drive. As much as anything, those lessons led to Love playing within himself, and the confines of an offense built to make the opponent defend everything.
On third-and-2 from the Packers’ 38-yard line with 1:34 left, he calmly hit Wicks underneath, and Wicks had space to chew up more yardage after the catch, going for 13 on the play. Two plays later, there was a laser to Doubs, into a window in front of Texans star corner Derek Stingley Jr. After that, he gave Doubs a chance to get the six yards he needed to cross over the 30, which the coaches told Love was the target line to position McManus for the kick.
And with a little luck, and a nice job by punter Daniel Whelan gathering a wayward snap, McManus, a Packer for all of five days, banged home the 45-yard game winner.
“I’m proud of the way we went out there, and we were able to come up victorious … get into field-goal range and do what we need to do,” Love says.
Then, Love conceded that LaFleur called the plays on the final possession. But the confidence he had to run the show was his own, and that was in large part thanks to the ownership of the offense LaFleur had given him.
The part I heard from others Sunday night: Love created a lot of his own opportunities on the final drive with protection adjustments in the face of a steady stream of all-out blitzes from the Texans, adjustments he wouldn’t have been able to, or empowered to, make a year ago.
“It’s continuing to work on that progression as a quarterback,” Love says.
In doing so, Love keeps checking boxes. As so do many of his teammates.
One cool element in Sunday’s win for Love was that it came against his close friend C.J. Stroud. The two share an agent, David Mulugheta, and have routinely worked out together in the offseason, making their first head-to-head game a bit of a measuring stick for both.
"It’s definitely very cool,” Love says. “I’m very close to C.J. I got a lot of respect for him and the player he is and the things he’s done so far in his career. I think he’s going to continue to build and grow and keep having a great career. Definitely being California guys and then having the same agent, I have a lot of love and respect for C.J. It was fun to be able to go up against him for the first time.”
Then again, Love would tell you that this wasn’t his best afternoon, either. Hewitt intercepted his second pass attempt of the game. Bullock picked him off near the end of the first half, and the Texans scored a touchdown on the ensuing possession.
But there the Packers were in the end, and Love gutting out another win.
And in praising the work of Whelan (“scooped it up off the ground a bit, he did a great job”), Love really summed up where he and his teammates landed in getting to 5–2.
“That’s what you got to do,” he says. “You got to make those big-time plays and make things right.”
At this point, we know Love has a knack for that, and so do his teammates.
As a result, the arrow keeps pointing up in Green Bay, and no one’s looking back.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jordan Love Continues to Validate Packers’ Decision to Move On from Aaron Rodgers.
