The Confounding Case of Jordan Love

Packers QB Jordan Love was great last year, but will he be great this year? It's frustratingly difficult to figure out.

(Dear all historical readers, RBSDM is having some issues right now, which make it all but impossible to go game by game historical series in the way that I’d like. Trent Green part 4 is coming. I promise. I’ll get it done as quickly as possible, but for now please enjoy what I’ve got to say about Jordan Love.)

The Packers have found their guy yet again.

Fresh off the presses, the Packers have just signed Jordan Love to a four year contract worth $220M, tying him with Joe Burrow’s $55M per year for the highest paid player in the history of the NFL. Earlier this week I wrote an article about that Joe Burrow contract, and how I think it’s a really iffy deal for the Bengals.

Ironically, I ended that article with the statement that the Bengals had just committed over $200M guaranteed to 2023 Jordan Love, and that if there is no improvement from there, that it would be a massive overpayment, and I guess that gives away what I believe about this Jordan Love contract.

So that’s it then? Good night Irene. This contract is a mistake?

I actually don’t think so. There’s more to Jordan Love than meets the eye.

Of course, any conversation about Jordan Love has to begin with the first half of the 2023 season, where he was terrible. No ifs. No ands. No buts. In the first nine games of the season (everything up through the loss in Pittsburgh), Jordan struggled to 0.073 EPA/Play (14th), which doesn’t seem so bad, but what does seem bad is the absolutely horrendous -3.5 CPOE (31st).

Completing 3.5 percent fewer passes than you should given their difficulty is generally not NFL calibre. Through those first ten weeks, that was worse than names like Kenny Pickett, Mac Jones, and even Tyson Bagent.

Did you even remember Tyson Bagent played in 2023?

None of those names are going to be NFL starters moving forward, and those are the names Jordan was being compared to. Luckily for him, the Packers in 2023 were a pretty solid (4th in the NFL) Offensive Line, with some really quality receivers too, so they were able to carry him to the modest 14th place ranking in results, but this stinks of an okay QB holding a great offence down.

An offence with Romeo Doubs, Christian Watson, Aaron Jones, and a very good offensive line should never be generating negative EPA/Play (meaning the average play makes you less likely to score), and should never be 3-6, but through ten weeks that’s exactly what was happening. I vividly remember talking to my friends and laughing about how bad Jordan Love was around this point of the season.

Far from a $220M contract extension, at this point Jordan was looking a serious bet to not be a NFL starter anymore after the conclusion of the 2023 season.

That’s when the switch flipped.

All of a sudden, the moribund 3-6 Packers came alive, with Jordan decimating the Chargers and Lions both in a row. Many said anybody can do it against those defences, but nobody was saying that after week 13, when Jordan scored all but two times he touched the ball in a statement victory over a Kansas City defence who would go on to carry a middling offence to a Super Bowl championship.

That’s the moment I knew Jordan was for real. I don’t know what happened between weeks ten and 11, but the tides had turned, and there was no getting this horse back in the barn.

The Packers do lose their next two games in a row, with a legitimate hiccup in New York, but forcing Baker Mayfield to play the best game of his NFL career in order to beat Jordan in week 15, and this mini losing streak set up the three last games of the season all being must win.

In three consecutive must win games to end the season (two on the road), Jordan generates 0.47, 0.40, and 0.32 EPA/Play in three relatively easy Packer victories, and don’t look now, but Green Bay was seriously dangerous going into the playoffs. My model had them as even money with Dallas, behind only San Francisco (this model includes the AFC, meaning they were ahead of Baltimore) as Super Bowl favourites going into the playoffs.

This is almost entirely because of Jordan Love.

Over the final eight games of the season, Jordan went from one of the worst QBs in the NFL running a negative EPA/Play offence to generating 0.266 EPA/Play (2nd) on a 6.2 CPOE (2nd), finishing behind only Brock Purdy in both. The Packers had turned the corner from a bad offence to the second best offence in the NFL in the second half (San Francisco) and this is why I had the Packers as one of my Super Bowl favourites. People laughed at me for it, but when you have the second best QB in the NFL, you can do anything.

What happened next is the best playoff game any QB has ever played in Dallas, where Jordan generated a never before seen 1.13 EPA/Play against the NFL’s fourth best defence in 2023. What’s wild to me is that people the very week it happened were already beginning to forget about it, instead choosing to continue to make fun of Dallas for being chokers (which they weren’t) and merely writing Jordan off as a beneficiary of Dallas incompetence (which he wasn’t) which was the reason I wrote this article about it, which goes into the GOAT debate about playoff performances, and (spoiler alert) Jordan’s comes out on top.

To this day, nobody talks about it. LOL Dallas has prevailed, and that’s sad, because barring a miracle that’s forever going to remain Jordan’s career defining performance, and even when contract time comes up and you’d think people would talk about playoff performance, they still don’t do so.

I don’t make many predictions on this blog, because to predict anything is the quickest way to make yourself look like a fool, but I put my ‘if the 49ers don’t take out the Packers, nobody will’ prediction from the end of that original Jordan Love article squarely into the correct category, because I firmly believe that if the Packers could’ve gotten by the 49ers (which they got close to doing) Detroit would not have been much difficulty. The Packers would’ve walked over them just like SF did once they got their act together, and in a Super Bowl between KC and Green Bay, who would you bet on?

I know the Packers were convincing winners in week 13. Do you think the Super Bowl would’ve gone any differently?

I don’t.

There was just one game between the Green Bay Packers and likely being the betting favourites to win the Super Bowl, and if they had been able to get over that hump, what would you think about this contract then?

Did Jordan Love get paid for having ‘eight good games,’ as some are saying? No he didn’t.

Including the playoffs, he got paid for having ten outstanding games, during which he led the NFL in CPOE, finished second in EPA/Play, at the head of the NFL’s second best offence, had the greatest playoff performance I’ve ever seen, and got the Packers perilously close to winning the Super Bowl. That’s a whale of a ten game stretch if you ask me.

I do understand what people are saying however. In the end, it is just ten games. This contract will be judged on how it holds up into the future. That means the question is how well do I think Jordan Love can sustain his end of season form?

Don’t be surprised if Jordan comes out a little slow to start this particular season, because missing training camp hurts, even if it’s only a little bit, but for the purpose of this analysis, let’s just ignore that to answer the broader question in play here: How well do white hot second half stretches hold into the next season?

Once again we find a Joe Burrow parallel, as the last player to have a second half as hot as Jordan’s 2023 is 2021 Joe Burrow that we talked about last time. Did this second half performance hold up?

No it didn’t. Joe has never been able to get back to that level again ever since, although as we discussed last time, Joe came out a completely different player for the 2022 season, and never really even tried to replicate his 2021 successes, so I’m willing to throw that one out in order to get to our next example, which is likely a much more operative one here. 2019 Ryan Tannehill.

I wrote a His Year article about 2019 Ryan Tannehill, but the cliff notes are that he was a backup in Tennessee before that team finally got tired of Marcus Mariota, threw Ryan in, and Ryan rewarded them with 0.315 EPA/Play on a 7.3 CPOE in the second half, and the team rewarded him with a healthy extension, very much like what’s just happened with Jordan Love. Did Ryan turn out to be worthy of his extension?

Absolutely.

In the following season of 2020, Ryan (results wise) was even better than his second half breakout. He generated 0.329 EPA/Play, which is the 18st best season in NFL history by that particular metric, which alone is a season worth extending a QB for, but over the entire course of the extension, Ryan generated 0.159 EPA/Play (7th in the NFL in this span) on a 1.9 CPOE (12th). If the Packers could get the seventh best QB results over the next four seasons, plus one all time great season like the Titans got out of Ryan, they would likely be happy with this extension, but there are other examples.

Jimmy Garoppolo stands out as a second half breakout that got rewarded with a big extension, but his career was marred by injury problems, so I’m going to choose to ignore it also, which leaves us with the next best example.

2013 Nick Foles.

Do any of you remember when Nick Foles generated 0.343 EPA/Play (2nd) on an 8.1 CPOE (1st) in half a season at the end of 2013? He was a serious pick for the best QB in the NFL, and this is what people are scared of when paying QBs for half seasons.

Nick Foles did not get rewarded with an extension for his top of the league half season, and thank goodness he didn’t, because even before the broken clavicle that ended his career as a top of the line player, he was never able to regain that 2013 form ever again. He had good moments, but was never again able to even be a full season starter at the NFL level.

One up. One down.

At this point I’d also like to note that I’m not mentioning 2012 Joe Flacco, or any similar second half ‘breakout,’ or any other similar that is not in 2023 Jordan Love’s class. We’re sticking to great players here.

2010 Josh Freeman is for some reason the breakout that everybody forgets, and in this discussion is touch and go, as in the back half of that season he generated 0.213 EPA/Play (4th), and for 2011 and beyond was also never able to get back to this level again. One more bad example, but also a player who was never as good as Jordan to begin with, so take it for what you will.

2006 Tony Romo is also a player I feel the need to mention here. Coming off the bench in relief of Drew Bledsoe, Tony generated 0.253 EPA/Play (3rd) on an 8.4 CPOE (1st) in the back half of the 2006 season, and was rewarded handsomely with a $67.5M extension (big money for the time). He was worth every penny of it. Over the following six seasons, Tony would rank seventh in both EPA/Play and CPOE, and cement a career as one of the most underrated Cowboys in the long and storied history of that team. If the Packers can get this out of Jordan Love, they’ll be happy with this contract.

Marc Bulger and his seven starts at the end of 2002 also deserve a mention. Coming off the bench in relief of Kurt Warner (who much like Drew Bledsoe would never come back) Marc generated 0.271 EPA/Play, and is truly a push in deciding whether he could maintain this level or not. Did he ever get back to this level again? No, but he did rank in the top five in my QB tier list after this while watching the Greatest Show on Turf fall apart around him. This is certainly not a down. It’s either an up or a push. Take your pick.

As far as the play tracking era, that’s really all. There are not many examples to cite when thinking about a player breaking out in this big of a way over the back half of a season. There is an entirely separate class of players who were great only over the front half of a season, but that is an entirely different phenomenon. As far as our examples, three teams were happy with their extensions, two were unhappy.

The thing with paying players based on half seasons is that it either goes very well or crashes and burns in extraordinary fashion. Burrow, Tannehill, Romo, and Bulger all were top five NFL QBs after their outstanding half seasons. Josh Freeman and Nick Foles were never full season NFL starters again. Based on recent history, those are really the only two paths ahead for Jordan Love.

That is quite scary, as Jordan did just spend half a season not really being a starting calibre NFL player, and remember that he doesn’t have a year two jump in front of him in the way somebody like CJ Stroud does, because he was very far from being a rookie this past year (Jordan was drafted all the way back in 2020). Is the 6.2 CPOE from the back half of the season the real Jordan Love, or is it the -3.5 front half?

We know what the Packers think, as they’ve just gone ahead and made Jordan tied for the highest paid QB in the NFL right now, but it’s a rather big risk they’re taking for a man whose CPOE last season (his only full NFL season), even with the amazing back half, only got up to 1.1.

I’m not telling Packers fans that they ought to be pessimistic. In fact I am a big Jordan Love booster. I think his style of play (at least in 2023) is particularly suited to winning, while also being fun to watch, which is not a combination you get all that often in the NFL anymore. This makes Jordan one of my favourite NFL players right now. Therefore, I want this contract to work. I think it’s going to work, but while my level of certainty is above 50 percent, it’s a lot less than 100 percent.

Luckily for me and for Packer fans and for Packer management, it’s not going to take very long to figure whether this contract was a mistake. Typically if you’ve paid a dud in the NFL it will reveal itself quickly. We’re going to know within six weeks of the new season whether Green Bay have bought a lemon, or if they’re hooked up with a brand new Ferrari. I don’t think there’s any chance at anything in between.

Thanks so much for reading.