Green Bay Packers fans will start to make up their minds about Jordan Love as early as Week 1, because that’s the degree to which Cheeseheads have grown to enjoy beating up on the Chicago Bears.
And while the expectations and demands placed upon Love in his first season as starting QB will be necessarily tempered by the reality of his situation, the best way for him to do himself an instant solid will be by continuing that modern dominance over a bitter rival.
Love has spent three years playing the game within the game, which has involved doing the right things, saying the right things and showing the right degree of patience, even when it must have been sorely tested.
Now, after all that, after every iteration of the Aaron Rodgers saga, after season upon season of dutiful backup life, he finally gets to play the actual games, the ones that revolve around wins and losses rather than growth and development and being a good company man.
The Packers will be patient with him, but if Love is able to get off to a winning start against the team’s most historic foe when Green Bay visits Soldier Field on Sept. 10, it will go a long way toward convincing the hardcore fans that all is still well. Rodgers, as he was happy to remind any Bears supporter he encountered, had a 24-5 record against Chicago.
Love finds himself in an interesting spot, and it’s hard to know exactly what to make of his position and its demands.
“I mean, it’s pressure,” Love told reporters last week. “No matter where you’re going to be at, there’s going to be pressure. You’re an NFL (starting) quarterback.”
Sure, there’s pressure. There is pressure in replacing Rodgers, pressure in being the featured guy for one of the National Football League’s most storied teams and pressure because the last time the Packers had a QB sit behind a legend for three years, the guy who sat became a Super Bowl champion and a four-time MVP.
But what sort of pressure is it exactly? No one is expecting Love to come in and do Rodgers-type things right away. Yes, there are timing similarities between Love’s backup spell and that of Rodgers when he deputized for Brett Favre all those years ago.
Pressure sits on Jordan Love with five prime-time games
Yet something that falls short of a deep postseason run won’t be regarded as a failure — at least not in year one of the Love era. Move things in the right direction, avoid a catastrophic falloff, and there will mostly be nods of firm approval. Especially if he beats the Bears a couple of times.
It is a new look and a new start. This is a stat that sounds impossible, but is true: Love will be the Packers’ third Week 1 QB … since 1992. That said, for some there is a genuine sense of relief that the guessing, wondering and ongoing drama that Rodgers put the team through is done, and everyone can just move on.
Love did not get his fifth-year option picked up but instead signed a one-year extension that will pay him a guaranteed minimum of $13.5 million. He got some help in the draft, with the Packers selecting three wide receivers and a pair of tight ends to boost a unit weakened by the loss of free agents Allen Lazard and Robert Tonyan.
“I can’t say what might happen this year, what might happen next year,” Love added. “I mean, who knows? I know it’s not going to be easy this year. But one thing I do is, I tell myself every day that I’m good enough.”
This kind of story doesn’t play out much anymore, and it took a fairly unique set of circumstances for this one to break down as it did.
When the Packers drafted Love, it wasn’t with the idea that it would take three years of sitting before he would get his full chance. The front office felt Rodgers’ time was winding down, then Rodgers got mad and used his anger as fuel for two excellent seasons, then it got complicated, then it got weird, then Rodgers signed a new deal and then, eventually, left for the New York Jets.
Hence, finally, we have Love as the starter.
In terms of expectation, he won’t get treated like a rookie, and more can and should be asked of him right now than even the stud crop of first-year throwers that generated such excitement at the top of the draft.
He won’t get treated exactly like someone who is a few years into his career, either. There will be disappointment if he looks too raw, even with the lack of on-field reps, but by the same token, it would be beyond Green Bay’s wildest dreams for him to start flinging it around with the effectiveness of draft-class contemporaries Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert or Tua Tagovailoa.
The important thing to remember is that Green Bay wants to love him. They love QBs, but that affection got tested with Rodgers because they felt like he was messing them around.
The fan base knows it had extraordinary fortunes with its signal-callers, going through as many in three decades as some struggling teams have churned through in a couple of weeks.
Love has the task of adding to that legacy. Pressure, opportunity, whatever it is, it starts right away.
