The Green Bay Packers and Jordan Love agreed to a four-year contract extension late Friday night, seemingly pulling off yet another transition of quarterbacking power. While the modern media landscape prevented the shift from what we’d consider seamless—the man Love was replacing was, after all, sequestered in a darkness retreat, could not apparently receive phone calls that weren’t via FaceTime and had a standing guest spot on a talk show once a week where he buried supposed truths about the process inside a hot pocket of conspiracy theories—the Packers’ ability to keep the team from being bad for an elongated period of time while a new quarterback assumes the reigns is nothing short of staggering.
Having the team do it a second time, assuming that Love plays the way he did over the back half of the 2023 season, also feels like a bit of kismet for the rest of the NFL coming off a ‘24 draft in which six teams selected supposed quarterbacks of the future, many of whom could use some seasoning.
I’m not just talking about the Atlanta Falcons, a team that selected Michael Penix Jr. with the No. 8 pick despite having just signed Kirk Cousins. This was, perhaps, the most glaring example of the Packers’ “process” of drafting a clear successor early hitting the mainstream. If Terry Fontenot, a general manager who has never won more than seven games in a season and is now on his second head coach, thus making him the kind of person who wouldn’t normally take these kind of long-term views when he needs to first post a winning season to validate his employment, is doing it then shouldn’t everyone?
And that’s why Love coming on at the right time has so much potential, especially when we talk about quarterbacks such as Penix, Drake Maye, J.J. McCarthy and Bo Nix in particular. Obviously, Caleb Williams is going to play. The Chicago Bears don’t have another veteran option on the roster. Everything is set up for Williams to pinball through the difficult moments with as much of a safety net as any No. 1 pick has enjoyed in recent memory.
The same can be said for Jayden Daniels. The Washington Commanders, as a franchise, need this. They have no time to set up some kind of quarterbacking succession plan when they simply, desperately need people to understand that they are no longer owned by Daniel Snyder.
But for the rest, why shouldn’t their respective teams take the Love example, appreciate its sample size, and try something similar? Maye is on a bad team that already has Jacoby Brissett. Why should he play a down in 2024 if he doesn’t need to; if it won’t make a difference in the win column? Nix is on a middling team swallowing a historical amount of dead money. He has a so-called quarterback whisperer as a head coach who is being paid a gargantuan amount of cash to turn around a roster he promised would be a snap. Why should he play now when Sean Payton can be grooming him behind the scenes like Matt LaFleur did with Love? McCarthy? Same thing. Sam Darnold is taking starter’s snaps during training camp. I cannot fathom a world where Darnold, combined with Kevin O’Connell’s play-calling, does not provide a better chance of winning immediately while also benefiting a 21-year-old kid who needs to grow.
If I had to guess, the selection of six quarterbacks in 2024 had less to do with this being a historical class and more to do with the league being in a bit of a dearth with not much certainty in future classes. Like the ‘11 draft class that included Jake Locker and Christian Ponder, these were clearly talented players who needed more time to adjust.
I’m not naive enough to think that, ultimately, a coach and a general manager proving their worthiness to their owner and securing their own futures, hamstrings this process every time. People in every workspace need to be validated. At your sales job, maybe that means a person switching your whole company from one perfectly fine platform to another. Believe it or not, that same useless jockeying takes place.
To the rest of the NFL, the Packers must look like one of the Nordic countries we read wistfully about. How no one pays when they go to the doctor and everyone is happy and spends a majority of their time in some natural restorative hotspring with close friends under constant sunlight. Theirs is a franchise that has the right idea, that has an assembly line to make it all work and that has a buy-in from everyone involved. When Jordan Love turns 30, you better believe there’s already going to be another Jordan Love on the roster.
But that foreign feeling shouldn’t be a deterrent. The Packers have confirmed Love is the real deal, paying him commensurate with the top quarterbacks in the NFL. They are a franchise that doesn’t make many mistakes. It’s time for the rest of the NFL to follow suit.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jordan Love Extension Proves the Packers' Approach to Quarterbacks Is Worth Emulating.
