The Green Bay Packers called a dagger concept and, at first blush for coach Matt LaFleur, the throw for Jordan Love was wide open down the field. So the resulting checkdown that went to AJ Dillon for 22 yards wasn’t something LaFleur initially saw as an ideal execution of the play.
So LaFleur investigated.
And the answer didn’t lie in what he saw. In fact, what made the play is what he didn’t see.
The Detroit Lions sent a fifth rusher, and looped Alim McNeill around nose tackle Quinton Bohanna, which gave the 3-technique McNeill a free run at Love. Feeling the pressure, Love didn’t have the extra tick on the clock he needed for the deeper concept to develop, so he quickly dished to his outlet man, Dillon, who was waiting for the checkdown in the flat. In the moment, LaFleur’s eyes were downfield with the receiver. But the full context gave him a prettier view.
“That gave me confidence like, Holy s--t, this kid’s getting the ball out of his hand,” says LaFleur from his office on the first floor of Lambeau nine months after Love tossed three touchdown passes in a 29–22 victory. “I was watching him. The dagger’s wide open. I didn’t see what happened in the pocket. The rush barreled down, he got the ball out. So we came back and called the dagger again, and he ripped the dagger when the pocket was clean.
“It’s just that feel. However long that takes, that feel that you get in the pocket, he’s done such a good job with it."
The second dagger came five plays later, going for 16 yards to Romeo Doubs to set up a field goal that put the Packers up 23–6 at halftime of the teams’ Thanksgiving Day game. It made a two-possession game a three-possession game, and Green Bay wound up cruising to a crucial win that was only close at the end after Detroit scored a touchdown with 46 seconds left.
The impact of the sequence, though, would be felt for much longer than just that afternoon.
As you dig into that game, you’ll find the strength of the plan the Packers have executed with Love over the past four-plus years since stunning the world with his selection at the end of the first round in April 2020.
How the first play unfolded essentially informed LaFleur that even if things didn’t go right around Love—and no protection is set up to allow an athletic defensive tackle a free run at the quarterback—on that kind of call, he could trust the former first-rounder to do the right thing. That, in turn, emboldened LaFleur to go right back to the concept a few plays later, with some adjustment, knowing if something else short-circuited, Love would handle it.
So if you thought you saw a different Love down the stretch last season—with the crescendo coming in Dallas on wild-card weekend—trust your eyes. LaFleur saw the same thing, too, but only because the quarterback earned a deeper trust the coaches needed to let him play that way.
My 17-day, 17-camp swing is complete. We have a few more trips coming. But for now, before I go back out on the road, there’s a lot to get to, and we’re getting to all that in the takeaways this week with …
• A look at how Kevin O’Connell’s handling the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterbacks, plus how Sam Darnold fits into that.
• An examination of the Detroit Lions’ new ethos, and one piece of evidence that shows how different this Detroit group is.
• More information on where things stand, and are going, with Brandon Aiyuk.
And a ton more. But we’re starting in Green Bay, with the Packers, and their quarterback, and the new starting point they collectively have after last year ended the way it did.
LaFleur’s never been shy about his feelings on developing young quarterbacks. Most of them, he thinks, should sit. When I asked him about it again (during my training camp visit July 30), as I had last summer, I brought up the example not just of Love, but of his predecessor in Green Bay, Aaron Rodgers, plus Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady. Put together, those four guys played less than two full games of snaps as NFL rookies.
“I’ve said it a million times,” LaFleur says. “A lot of quarterbacks in this league are talented. They’re just not ready for the situation. They don’t have the right people around them. It’s such a different game, in terms of how much information they have to take in, in order to process and be able to play fast. There are too many examples of guys that have sat for at least some time to learn and then go play.
“I’ve said it a million times. A lot of quarterbacks in this league are talented. They’re just not ready for the situation. They don’t have the right people around them. It’s such a different game, in terms of how much information they have to take in, in order to process and be able to play fast. There are too many examples of guys that have sat for at least some time to learn and then go play.”Matt LaFleur
“Kirk Cousins, I saw it, I was with him. Geno [Smith] started and didn’t do well. Then he sat and came back, he’s done pretty well. I think there’s a lot of great examples of guys that have become dudes. You mentioned three of those guys that have become real dudes.”
Love looks like he’s on the way to becoming one now. But, LaFleur contends, it might not have happened if he’d have been thrown into the line of fire consistently—like he was for his first start in 2021 when the Chiefs zero-blitzed him into oblivion—and had his confidence thrown into a blender.
Instead, the now-25-year-old got to sit and watch for almost all of three full seasons behind Rodgers. The damage of that night in Kansas City three years ago wasn’t compounded by a three- or four-game losing streak. He was able to take it for what it was. And just as valuable, he saw that even one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever walk the planet had his own ups and downs through an NFL season.
That experience was priceless as Love navigated 2023.
After throwing for six touchdowns without a pick in his first two starts, Love posted just two touchdowns and six interceptions over the next three weeks. After starting 2–1, the Packers lost four consecutive games, and entered Thanksgiving week at 3–6, with Love failing to post even a passer rating of 75 in five of his nine starts. Going through it, he could draw on watching a late-30s Rodgers, fighting through things and implicitly giving Love an important lesson—this stuff is hard.
"Being on the bench for those three years, seeing a season, seeing how Aaron went about it, that’s what got me to understand that stuff’s not going to be perfect in the NFL,” says Love, who was sitting by his locker during my camp visit. “You watch one of the greatest quarterbacks ever do it and it’s hard for him. If it’s hard for him, you know it’s hard for everyone out there. It’s a team sport. It takes everybody out there on the field doing their job.”
So rather than dwell on his struggles, he learned from them. Rather than wallow in his own missteps, he tried to set the pace for everyone on a young offense to learn from theirs.
He knew, as he said, he wasn’t going at it alone, and there wouldn’t be one throw, or series, or one win that would fix what was going wrong. Executing the offense to perfection would take time, just like he saw it had, at points, for the offense when Rodgers was its pilot.
“I’m very confident in myself; you always got to keep that confidence up,” Love says. “That’s the only way you can go about it. Understanding that we weren’t playing at our best, we had so much more out there, whether it was misplays, misreads, seeing stuff right, not performing the way I need to. And understanding that’s all on me, and I got to relax. I just stayed confident in that process that we’re going to get better through this.”
Clearly, Love did, and so did the young crew of receivers around him, and an offensive line that had to, again, adjust without left tackle David Bakhtiari.
Four days before the Thanksgiving game, Love engineered a game-winning, seven-play, 75-yard drive late in the fourth quarter to get the Packers to 4–6 with a 23–20 win over the Los Angeles Chargers. The dagger calls against the Lions came four days later and, yes, Love saw them as affirmation that LaFleur’s confidence in him, and the offense, was coming, even when the wins weren’t.
The two saw the sequence the same way—with Love’s thought being that the coach called a play requiring a lot of the quarterback, and could have resulted in disaster just a few snaps earlier.
“He can go back to it now and not be like, Alright, he messed his first one up, I got to have these conservative play-calls that I know he’s not going to mess it up,” Love says. “As a quarterback, you have to earn that trust from the play-caller to keep dialing up these plays and just trust that you’re going to make the right decision with it. Matt said that a bunch of times. I definitely agree that once we started finding our rhythm, I was building more of a chemistry, with why he was calling certain plays, on what the look is.
“He’s trusting I’m going to make the decisions that guys are going to be in the right space at the right time to make the play.”
The truth? The first thought on LaFleur’s part that Love could get to where he was in Detroit came 11 days earlier in Pittsburgh. The Packers lost that game, 23–19, and Love tossed interceptions on Green Bay’s final two possessions, but they had to play from behind for almost the entire afternoon on the road. What was real—the quarterback was applying lessons learned after being gun shy cost him earlier in the year, and specifically in a 17–13 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 5.
What LaFleur was seeing was a guy who was close to breaking through. Because he had all that time to learn, and see how an NFL season went, he wouldn’t be broken by a few bad weeks. He was getting the feel for the game that LaFleur talked about.
"I think my whole mindset kind of switched,” Love says. “Coming off that Raiders game, I was hesitating a little too much. I wasn’t trusting myself as much. I would see stuff and just hesitate—I wasn’t getting the ball out, playing fast. My mindset switched after that game. Trust everything I see. Play on time. Trust my feet. If the ball’s not coming out right now, get a checkdown. Get a completion. Really just trust what I see. Rip the ball. Don’t hesitate.
“Early on in that [Steelers] game, I started really feeling that, started playing well. We got in the two-minute situation toward the end where there was a lot of good situational awareness there. I didn’t have the outcome I wanted. But I definitely felt that confidence in myself keep picking up. I was playing fast and getting the ball out and playing on time.”
Which led to wins over the Lions and Kansas City Chiefs and, just as importantly, the resilience to ride out losses that followed to the New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
You know the rest. The Packers won three straight to close out the regular season and sneak into the playoffs. Then, somehow, Green Bay marched into Dallas and blew the Cowboys right off the field, with their young quarterback posting a near-perfect passer rating after completing 16-of-21 throws for 272 yards and three touchdowns.
There was a throw in that game, too, that perfectly illustrated how far he’d come.
In college, playing in a pure spread, no-huddle offense at Utah State, Love had no responsibility to set protections. So in that sense, the very raw Love was coming into the NFL starting from zero—which is one reason why, even a year and a half in, on that night in Kansas City, he simply couldn’t come up with the answers he needed.
Against Dallas, Love didn’t have all the answers, but he could weaponize them against one of the most dangerous defenses in football. His first touchdown pass of that afternoon came in the second quarter, and was an off-balance throw on a post to Dontayvion Wicks right down the middle for 20 yards. On the play, he recognized Dallas’s defense quickly, changed the protection, got everyone on the same page, bought time, and made the throw.
Four years ago, he might not have been able to do one of those things effectively in that particular spot. And here, he was doing all of them at once.
“It was one of those situations where my first start against Kansas City, we got all-outed so many times, I didn’t have a great answer,” he says. “That was my first start. Didn’t really have a great feel for all-out [blitzes] and protection adjustments and just how fast I got to play as a quarterback to be able to pick that up and find the answers and take advantage of what they’re doing. … That was a proud moment for me.”
He’d come a long way, for sure.
Moreover, that day showed emphatically that the best was yet to come.
LaFleur looks back on 2023 now as affirmation of the person, as well as the player, the Packers drafted in ’20. In other words, the strides he made within the offense were great, and immense, and no one’s denying him that. Yet, who he showed himself to be in dealing with everything that was thrown at him, and in a place where the quarterbacking bar is set impossibly high, was even more impressive.
“The thing that I was most impressed by last year was when we were sitting at 2–5 and 3–6, I didn’t feel him ever wavering in his belief, first and foremost with himself and everything that we are doing,” LaFleur says. “I feel like it is rare. A guy gets discouraged, or a guy’s got a lot of fight in him. He doesn’t allow the moment, whether good or bad, dictate what happens next. He just continues to work and grind. He’s seen the benefits of it.”
So just as the Packers saw that the negative didn’t impact Love last year, they trust the positive won’t impact who he is, or has been, this year.
That starts with all of the hype over how he played in the playoffs, and then extends to how the Packers rewarded him at the start of camp with a four-year, $220 million extension. It’s a massive investment to make, to be sure, in a guy who’s still has made only 18 NFL starts.
But, as the Packers see it, it’s betting on a guy who had been unaffected by all of the outside forces around him for four years and who, they’ll wager, won’t be changed by the money, either. To this point, based on how he’s handled himself, Love’s only given them more affirmation that the money was, and will be, well spent.
“I think all that goes back to remembering where you came from, remembering being the backup, being behind the guy that was in that position, seeing how he goes about his business,” Love says. “And just remembering my first year, when there were a lot of question marks, how this team had my back. Now we’re in a different spot. So don’t change up. Be a good teammate. Be all these things that I’ve been.
“That’s the reason why guys respect you, respect the work you put in everyday, being out there on the field with them, trying to be a leader as best I can. I’m trying to definitely not switch up and do anything different. Just remember where you came from.”
And Love believes he can get to where all of those Packer greats have been before him.
Part of that’s his belief in himself. Part of it’s his belief in how he was developed.
In the beginning, it meant knowing how far he was from where Rodgers was, and having that reinforced. There were times, he says, in the quarterback room, where Rodgers was going through a play, and would be showing how he’d ID’d everything pre-snap, and changed what seemed like a million things in a half-second, and Love would ask, What did he see there? And coaches respond, Don’t even worry about that, that’s next level stuff.
Since, it’s been about doing everything he can to close that gap and reach for that bar, set impossibly high. Whether or not he’ll ever be able to clear it is a question that can’t be answered yet. Whether his pursuit of it (and knowledge of where it is) is benefitting him, though, is undeniable.
“You're starting down here,” Love says, lowering his hand to the ground. “It gives you goals to be able to reach for—One day, I want to be able to do this. Aaron, he's calling plays in two-minute, calling protection adjustments, to understand why he’s doing that, what he's thinking. That's the pinnacle of QB play, when you can do all that on your own and you don't need anybody to help you out there.
“It was awesome to see. And who knows? If I came in as a rookie and didn't have that, who knows what you even think as a quarterback? You'd be like, Alright, I got all this stuff figured out. No, it’s that’s you don't know what you don't know. It was awesome to see.”
Slowly, it’s gone from seeing to doing. Last year, it was the aforementioned license to adjust protections from the line of scrimmage. This year, it’s the power to call plays in the two-minute drill, something that, in Love’s words, “you gotta be able to understand the offense, get tells on what the defense is doing, and think a whole play ahead” to pull off.
And with that, he’s taking steps, and getting closer to where he wants to be.
He knows he’s still got a long way to go. But if those two dagger calls from last Thanksgiving are a snapshot of anything, it’s that the Packers are giving him, and believe he has, a very real shot to get there.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sitting Jordan Love Was the Right Thing to Do for the Packers.
