The Green Bay Packers are 8-8 and one win away from punching their ticket to the playoffs. When the season first began, there were not many who predicted that they would be in this position. Indeed, the decision to move on from Aaron Rodgers in favor of Jordan Love had many people, even Packers fans, believing that the 2023 season would be wrought with challenges and growing pains.
There were certainly plenty of those. At one point, the Packers were 2-5 and looked like a team that would be picking in the top 10 of the 2024 NFL Draft. However, Love and the offense righted the ship and have put together some impressive games as of late. After 16 games played, Love has a 63.1% completion percentage, 3,843 yards, 30 touchdowns, and 11 interceptions.
Before the season, and during Green Bay’s poor run of games in October, many pointed at Love and the decision to draft and keep him as mistakes. National naysayers like Skip Bayless and Colin Cowherd bemoaned the Packers’ decision and smugly argued that he would never be a good NFL quarterback.
Love has made them, and many others, look foolish for their rash analysis. Even Cowherd, who once called Love a game manager and “nothing special” has changed his tune.
The NFL is very much a “what have you done for me lately” business. While there are bad teams every year, the expectation of every fan base (and owner) is for their team to win immediately and often. In their minds, players should come to the NFL as Pro Bowl-caliber players in no need of development.
Of course, that is not the case. Many players take one, two, or even more years to reach their full potential. This is especially true of quarterbacks, which may be the most over-scrutinized position in all of sports.
Due to the demand to “win now,” many players are thrust into starting jobs when they are not ready. In Green Bay, though, the front office has taken the road of draft and development. That style may be boring and drive fans crazy, but it has delivered the team their third straight franchise quarterback.
Cowherd discusses this strategy, how it makes Green Bay different, and why Love is so successful in one of his most recent segments:
In this segment, Cowherd discusses how the Denver Broncos and Miami Dolphins took decades to replace their first Hall of Fame quarterbacks (John Elway and Dan Marino, respectively). He then discusses how Green Bay has done everything right when it came to finding their quarterback:
“Patience. Development. He was bad in October. Like, I was like ‘This doesn’t work. This is bad.’ But that’s the difference from like Chicago, where they can’t get quarterback right, and in Green Bay, where they always seem to get quarterback right.
“Offensive coach, good receiver drafts, patience, develop, not forced to play right away. Doesn’t get beat up physically, doesn’t get beat up emotionally. If you put Justin Fields in Green Bay and Jordan Love in Chicago, I don’t know this to be true, but it wouldn’t shock me if their careers were reversed.”
This is, obviously, Cowherd just spewing the most popular narrative of the day. This is a man who was singing Love’s praises every week leading up to the 2020 NFL Draft, and immediately when Green Bay took him decided that Love was the worst quarterback in the history of mankind.
While Cowherd will say that he thought Love was bad in October, one has to cringe at how confidently he explains the Packers’ approach to developing their players. He talks about it as if he knew it would work out all along when in reality he was one of the loudest voices criticizing them.
Anything for ratings, I suppose.
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