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Rob Demovsky, ESPN Staff Writer
GREEN BAY, Wis. — The only time Aaron Rodgers‘ name came up in the moments immediately after the Green Bay Packers clinched their spot in the playoffs was when someone asked Jordan Love if this was one of the moments he imagined during his three years as Rodgers’ backup.
“Being on the bench for those three years and being behind Aaron and wanting to be out there so bad,” Love said. “Now that I’ve got my opportunity, just making the most of it, taking it and running with it.”
“It’s definitely something that I was waiting for and dreaming of,” Love added. “And it definitely is everything that it’s living up to be.”
And this is something even Rodgers never experienced.
Neither did Brett Favre.
No matter what Love does from here on out — whether he wins any MVPs or a Super Bowl like those two before him — he will carry a distinction neither Favre nor Rodgers could ever claim: He’s a playoff quarterback in his first season as Green Bay’s full-time starting quarterback. And he’s leading the NFL’s youngest team to boot.
“It’s amazing for Jordan,” Packers guard Jon Runyan said. “First-year starter. It’s tough to follow up two Hall of Fame quarterbacks and get thrown into your first year here [with] a lot of outside noise and having a historically young team, which you could say doesn’t help you very much as well. But Jordan’s been such a calm presence. He has complete control of the offense. Everybody looks to him as a leader, and he just goes out there and just doesn’t blink at all.”
Love’s Packers (9-8) grabbed the final NFC wild-card spot and play at the No. 2-seeded Dallas Cowboys on Sunday (4:25 p.m. ET, Fox). It took Rodgers until his second year as a starter to make the playoffs and until his third year to win a playoff game (on his way to being named Super Bowl XLV MVP). Favre also led the Packers to the playoffs in his second season (1993), and he won a game in that postseason.
Favre’s 1992 Packers would have made the playoffs if the current format — seven playoff teams from each conference — had been in place. That team needed to win its season finale but instead got drilled at Minnesota, 27-7, to finish 9-7 and then missed out on the final wild-card spot to Washington on a tiebreaker.
Despite Favre’s relative inexperience then, he had an established premier veteran receiver in Sterling Sharpe, who was in the prime of his career, and tight end Jackie Harris.
Rodgers didn’t sniff the playoffs in 2008, his first season as the starter. He had an established group of pass-catchers that included Greg Jennings, Donald Driver and Donald Lee, but the defense let them down time and again. The Packers finished 6-10 and were eliminated from playoff contention by Week 15.
Current players are reminded almost daily of what Favre and Rodgers accomplished; pictures of big moments and the championship teams line the hallways of the team facility. But even one of the most veteran players on the roster had no idea that neither made the playoffs in his first season as the starter.
“I don’t know that, no,” seventh-year defensive tackle Kenny Clark said. “It just says a lot about [Love].”
The 2023 Packers didn’t look like they had a playoff offense when they were 2-5 and had lost four in a row, including three straight ugly games in which they scored 13, 17 and 10 points. And they didn’t look like a playoff team two weeks later when they were 3-6.
The offense finally started to look like a playoff-caliber unit in the Packers’ 23-20 win over the Chargers in Week 11. Before that, Love was 33rd (last among qualified quarterbacks) in completion percentage at 58.7% and tied for 12th in touchdown passes (14) to go along with 10 interceptions.
Over the final eight games, Love completed 70.3% of his passes (third best over that stretch) and was second in touchdown passes (18, one behind Dallas’ Dak Prescott) with only one interception.
For the entire 17-game season, Love finished second in the NFL with 32 touchdown passes (second to Prescott’s 36) and raised his completion percentage to 64.2% while throwing for 4,159 yards (seventh best) — numbers that compare favorably to Rodgers’ 2008 season (63.6%, 4,038 yards, 28 touchdowns in 16 games).
All this with the youngest team in the NFL and one of the youngest ever to make the playoffs. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Packers are the fourth-youngest team to make the playoffs since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger at an average age of 25.58 based on weighted playing time.
Thirty-one of Love’s touchdowns went to either first- or second-year players; the Packers are tied for the second-most such scores in a season in NFL history behind only the 1961 Houston Oilers.
No wonder it took some time to weave it all together.
To that end, receiver Bo Melton revealed last week that Love has been hosting the offense for a version of dinner and a movie. Love has the meals catered at his house while the players watch game film on Monday nights.
“I think just the bond of staying connected with him is big as a wide receiver,” said Melton, who has 11 catches for 167 yards and a touchdown in the past two games as an injury replacement while the likes of Christian Watson, Romeo Doubs, Jayden Reed and Dontayvion Wicks have each missed time.
“When you know somebody a little more, you’re willing to go the extra inch for him and fight a little more for him,” said Reed, who broke Sharpe’s team record for rookie receptions (64). “So I think it’s always great to get that brotherhood outside the building because at the end of the day, one day football’s going to end, man. If you don’t got the brotherhood, you got no purpose.”
Said Runyan: “This team, in the four years that I’ve been here, just feels different. Just how tight-knit everybody is around here.”
To that end, even those on the defensive side have been part of the camaraderie.
“I’ve been on this team for two years now, and team chemistry is way better than it was the year before,” linebacker Quay Walker said.
Walker believes it’s in large part because so many of the players are in the same age range, as opposed to last season when Rodgers, 39, was one of eight players 30 or older.
“It’s a lot of young guys in here,” Walker said. “Like I’ve been on the offensive side a lot more messing with the receivers because they’re young. So I always mess with them. I always talk to them like I’m a vet, even though I’m only a second-year. I love the young energy we got in here.”
All this validated not only general manager Brian Gutekunst’s divisive decision to trade up for Love in the first round of the 2020 draft, but also his belief that it would be best to build a young team around Love that would grow together.
Coach Matt LaFleur, too, had something to prove: that he could win without Rodgers. But in the moment that LaFleur sprinted across the field to meet his first-year starting quarterback for an embrace after the Packers had clinched their playoff spot, it was all about Love.
“I know it’s not always easy when you’re a first-round pick and you have to sit there and watch, and wait your turn,” LaFleur said. “That’s tough, that’s tough on a lot of guys. But he approached it the right way, he’s been a great teammate, he’s been super supportive in whatever role he’s taken on, and he’s excelled in whatever role he’s taken on. It’s really rewarding to see the progress he’s made over the course of these few years.”
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