This time last year Jordan Love was an unknown. The Green Bay Packers’ fourth-year quarterback was still getting adjusted to the speed of the NFL game. He was hesitant. He did not always trust what he was seeing, because he was in the process of recognizing everything coming at him.
In 2023, Love transformed right before everyone’s eyes, moving from a large question mark in his first year as a fulltime starter to becoming the NFL’s new flavor of the moment, after exploding the latter portion of the season. Check his game logs and you will see a marked improvement from where he was after Week 9 to where he finished.
After Week 9, the Packers were drowning. They were sitting at 3-6 and a big reason why was Love’s play. He threw 10 interceptions against eight TDs and less than a 60-percent completion rate. After Week 9, Love exploded to lead the Packers to an 6-2 finish, and a Wild Card upset over the Dallas Cowboys. In that span, Love threw 21 touchdown passes against one interception, and in eight of the last nine games finished with over 100-plus quarterback rating. He ended the season with 32 touchdown passes, behind only Dak Prescott’s NFL-high 36 TD tosses. At one point last season, Love was last among starters in completion percentage and rallied to finish 21st overall (64.2).
He received a huge contract extension this offseason, and with the addition of horse back Josh Jacobs, he will be that much more dangerous—and Eagles’ new defensive coordinator Vic Fangio knows it.
“Yeah, the biggest problem in defending their offense is they run it just as good as they throw it, so they have a really good mix on first and second down, running play-action, and it makes it hard to defend,” Fangio said. “Then you throw in what you alluded to of a scrambling mobile quarterback, it adds another dimension to it. They’re really tough to defend. They run it and throw it equally well, and you throw in an athletic quarterback, and it’ll be an all-day sucker.”
Getting heat on Love will be essential. That will have to come from a push inside. When asked this week about the condition of defensive tackles Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis, Fangio, in only his direct way of putting it, said, “We’ll see. They haven’t been pushed like they potentially can be pushed in this game as far as the amount of plays they may have to play. So that’s TBD.”
Is Carter where Fangio wants him? Will Carter be on a play count?
“You know, I think we’ll get a better barometer of that after this game,” Fangio said. “He only, I think, played three plays in the opening preseason game. Practice is practice. I think I’ll be better able to answer that in a couple weeks.”
This is a new defense, learning a new scheme, even though some of the veterans have played in various incarnations of what Fangio does. Still, does Fangio feel his defense had enough time to come together and be ready for Love and the Packers?
“You never get enough (time), in my opinion,” he said. “But we certainly have had enough to be ready. I think it would have been nice to have another joint practice or two to help that along to where we could see different offenses and different schematics from the opponent. But, overall, I think it went well.”
We’ll see.
