How Jordan Love became the Packers’ next franchise QB: ‘I’m living the dream’

After the Añejo tequila from the night before had worn off, Aaron Rodgers asked Packers assistant director of communications Tom Fanning for Jordan Love’s cell phone number.

Rodgers was driving home in Southern California from a workout the morning after the first round of the 2020 NFL Draft. Before he entered an area without service, he stopped on the side of the road to call his newest teammate.

Brett Favre infamously said his contract didn’t mandate mentoring Rodgers, the 2005 first-round pick who sat behind Favre for three years. For all Love knew, he’d get the same cold shoulder.

Love didn’t want to initiate the conversation with Rodgers that soon after the pick since he didn’t know how the starting quarterback felt. As the mayhem from draft night faded, Love got that answer.

“‘Look, man, I know it’s not the ideal situation right away for you, but I know what it’s like to be in your position,’” Rodgers recalled telling Love in a recent phone conversation with The Athletic. “‘We’re gonna have some fun together. I’m gonna help you out.’

“So just trying to alleviate any nerves he might have. I was in that position, so I knew it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t ask to be picked by the Packers.”

Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst shocked the NFL by trading up in the first round to draft a quarterback with four years remaining on Rodgers’ contract. The Packers were fresh off an NFC Championship Game appearance, too.

Gutekunst not drafting a wide receiver to complement Davante Adams was highly scrutinized — the Vikings took Justin Jefferson at No. 22 and the 49ers took Brandon Aiyuk at No. 25 — but …

“We were looking to trade up to possibly get a receiver,” Gutekunst says now. “We were looking at doing a lot of different things in that draft. Didn’t come together.”

Instead, the Packers dealt a fourth-round pick to the Dolphins while moving from No. 30 to No. 26.

“The opportunity came to take Jordan, who was the last best guy on our board,” Gutekunst said. “It was like, ‘Am I really gonna pass up on a quarterback that we really think can play because of a fourth-round pick?’ Not knowing if he would be there four picks later, it didn’t make any sense.

“Sitting here today, sure glad we did it.”

The @packers traded up to get @USUFootball QB @jordan3love! 🧀 #NFLDraft

📺: 2020 #NFLDraft on NFLN/ESPN/ABC
📱: pic.twitter.com/CYwVPSx65u

— NFL (@NFL) April 24, 2020

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The Packers’ quarterback room in 2020 implemented a system of fines. At the end of each week, the number of fine points totaled for various infractions equaled the number of throws on a dart board players and coaches got. Whoever had the highest darts score bought everyone in the room a gift.

Head coach Matt LaFleur fined himself for making bad jokes. Rodgers fined himself for being too sensitive. Love?

“He wasn’t talking, so we had to find a way to get his fine points up,” Rodgers said. “So we just tagged him with a bunch of quiet fines all the time … It’d be a conversation, he wouldn’t say anything for a minute. Quiet fine, Jordan.”

“If I didn’t say anything, somebody would blurt it out,” Love said, “whether it was him, (Nathaniel) Hackett, (Luke) Getsy … That was always fun and obviously it got old, but I racked up a ton of quiet fines throughout the year.”

While the objective of the fines was to have fun, the genesis of Love’s dates to Rodgers’ NFL beginning.

“I was really quiet in my meetings,” Rodgers said. “I just didn’t wanna interrupt anything … nobody ever said, ‘Hey, Aaron, this is why this happened or this is why I’m doing this,’ so I learned from that and I always said if I got that opportunity, I’m gonna do it how I would’ve wanted it. So I tried to involve him in the conversation and make sure he could see things the right way and give little critiques, but always felt like it was important to, when he did make mistakes, to remind him that every one of those mistakes that you’ve made, I’ve made that and then some.”

Not only was Love timid in meetings as he processed information slower than others, but also he was raw on the field. The Packers knew that’s who they were getting. In the summer of 2019, Gutekunst watched Love’s sophomore season at Utah State from the year prior. He completed 64 percent of his passes for 3,567 yards, 32 touchdowns and six interceptions. Gutekunst saw a gifted quarterback who was raw, yes, but one who had what he called a loose shoulder and elbow, able to make plays a lot of quarterbacks couldn’t.

That October, Gutekunst visited Baton Rouge, La., to watch Love play No. 5 LSU. The Tigers won, 42-6, while Love completed 15 of 30 passes for 130 yards and three interceptions.

“Obviously, they got hammered,” Gutekunst said. “But at the same time, the way he handled himself and the way he kept trying to win … he never backed down, started checking the ball down not to get hit. He kept trying to make plays, which I thought said something about the kid.”

Gutekunst then visited Texas Tech to scout linebacker Jordyn Brooks, whom the Seahawks drafted the selection after Love, and to pick the brain of Red Raiders head coach Matt Wells. Wells, who had been the quarterback coach for Gutekunst’s brother at Navy, was Love’s head coach at Utah State during his freshman and sophomore seasons and raved about him. So yes, Love was raw. And yes, such drastic turnover with Utah State’s offensive staff and personnel led to Love throwing only 20 touchdowns and a nation-worst 17 interceptions as a junior. But there was plenty under the surface that enticed the Packers.

LaFleur says now that Love was a natural thrower, meaning he played with a good base, could throw from different platforms and could throw from a muddy pocket without moving his feet. His fundamentals, footwork and pocket manipulation, however, needed help.

“It was foreign to him,” LaFleur said. “He had never been coached on all that stuff.”

Love was keenly aware of the Packers’ quarterback pecking order when his cell phone displayed the Green Bay area code on draft night. He wasn’t ready to play anyway, so much so that Tim Boyle made the 53-man roster to back up Rodgers while Love refined his fundamentals and learned the offense.

LaFleur mentioned four quarterbacks — Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Rodgers and Kirk Cousins, whom he coached in Washington for the first two years of Cousins’ career — to illustrate how sitting to start a career can help. Most first-round quarterbacks, LaFleur said, are forced into situations they’re not ready for because their fundamentals aren’t good enough and/or the surrounding talent is deficient.

“And they get ruined,” LaFleur added. “So to allow (Love) to come into a situation, to learn, to develop, to allow just that natural growth (to) occur certainly benefitted him.”

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Love didn’t know if he’d ever play regular-season snaps for the Packers again after Rodgers signed his three-year contract extension in March 2022.

In reality, the deal was for one year to alleviate salary cap stress with two years tacked on, but Love still pondered playing for another team as he entered Year 3 still behind Rodgers.

“Probably won’t be playing for whatever the foreseeable future is, so what now?” Love recalled thinking. “It was definitely a lot of questions and what’s gonna happen here? Didn’t really know what my future would be like, if I would be here in Green Bay, if they were gonna try and trade me, but talking to my agents, a lot of different things, a lot of different scenarios … it was tough for me right after that.

“I’m gonna get reps in preseason that I know I’m gonna get, so just going out there and trying to make the most of that and if I have a great preseason and another team is asking for me to come in and try to be the starter for them, just kinda play it out.”

Did Gutekunst ever consider trading Love?

“Not one time,” he said.

When the Packers drafted Love, Gutekunst didn’t have a “grand plan” regarding Love’s takeover timetable. Rodgers thought he had one or two years left in Green Bay after Love’s arrival, but then he won consecutive MVPs. Gutekunst thought Love was close to ready after the heir apparent’s second season. He had spent the entire offseason leading the starting offense as Rodgers held out after his agent requested a trade.

Gutekunst was wary of trading Rodgers after his second MVP, however, because of how the decision would’ve been received inside 1265 Lombardi Ave.

“I don’t know if the organization was ready for that and if we would’ve had some struggles, just how that all would’ve gone,” Gutekunst said. “Just like we had struggles last year, I’m not sure … how our organization would’ve handled it.”

If Gutekunst wasn’t entirely sold on Love after the 2021 season, the 2022 season made up his mind. Love again ran the starting offense during the offseason. As scout-team quarterback, he threw no-look passes against the starting defense, cornerback Jaire Alexander said. He was in “complete control,” Gutekunst said, noting how Love was more aggressive while also striking the fine line between attempting high-difficulty throws and being conservative.

When Rodgers missed the final quarter-plus of a Week 12 Sunday night game in Philadelphia with what he feared was a punctured lung, Love showed a national audience what the Packers saw every day. Green Bay lost, 40-33, but Love completed 6 of 9 passes for 113 yards and a touchdown, a 63-yard Christian Watson score after Love hit him on a strike route over the middle. His best throw was an incompletion, a hole shot to running back Aaron Jones up the right sideline that Jones has since lamented dropping. Love executed multiple plays he was uncomfortable with because of a lack of reps, but LaFleur asked his quarterback to trust his play calling and the backup delivered.

Rodgers likened that game to Week 13 in 2007, when Favre suffered an elbow injury in the second quarter against the Cowboys. The Packers lost, just as they did in 2022 to the Eagles, but Rodgers completed 18 of 26 passes for 201 yards and a touchdown to prove it was time.

Love learned from Rodgers over their three years together how to be consistent with pocket movements, setting protections, ball placements, reads, footwork and the confidence to make every throw after a Utah State career Love called a roller coaster.

Equipped with what he learned from a future Hall of Famer, Love’s time had come.

“Once he started playing well in the third year,” Rodgers said, “it really felt like the entire year that this (Rodgers as a Packer) was probably coming to an end unless we won the Super Bowl. Win the Super Bowl, who knows what I do? But either way, it felt like it was time for Jordan to take over.”

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Packers center Josh Myers lost his father at age 59 early in training camp this year. The team gave Myers a private jet to fly home to Miamisburg, Ohio, for the funeral on an off day. Joining him were offensive line coach Luke Butkus, offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich, director of player engagement Grey Ruegamer, former Packers offensive lineman Royce Newman, left guard Elgton Jenkins and Myers’ quarterback, Love.

“That’s exactly an example of his leadership,” Myers said. “To say that that meant a lot to me is an understatement, so yeah, that’s a perfect example of it.”

Love knew what Myers was going through. When Love was 14, his father died by suicide and it meant a lot to Love when his teammates at the time attended his father’s funeral.

“Josh is my brother. He’s one of the guys I’m closest with on the team,” Love said. “Knowing what Josh was probably going through, what his family’s going through … it was a no-brainer.”

Earning the respect of a locker room helps one become a franchise quarterback. Love wanted to be a fly on the wall in those quarterback meetings, but now he commands the walls inside Lambeau Field.

Whether it’s spending his off day at the funeral of a teammate’s father in Ohio, inviting teammates to his house for film sessions and dinner or creating custom handshakes with running backs who have no chance of making the team, Love makes guys want to play for him for reasons beyond football.

“Franchise QB, that’s the basis of it,” Packers quarterback Sean Clifford said. “For him to take time out of his day — a guy who, you never know, could be in one day and then out literally the next — but he’s gonna make sure to go in, say hello, make time for that person because that’s just the type of person he is.”

LaFleur was the Falcons quarterbacks coach in 2015 and 2016 and once asked Matt Ryan what the best advice he ever got was. When he entered the league in 2008 as the No. 3 pick, Ryan said, he was told to just be one of the guys.

“He’s the highest-paid player ever … and he doesn’t walk around and act like it,” Alexander said of Love. “His spirit and his energy toward the locker room is infectious.”

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In multiple interviews with The Athletic over the past two years, Gutekunst has pinpointed one game Love played in both college and the NFL that impressed him. One was the 36-point loss to LSU. The other was Green Bay’s 13-7 loss to the Chiefs in 2021, a Sunday afternoon game Love started on short notice after Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 that Wednesday.

Most of Green Bay’s plan to face defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s blitzes was formed on Monday and Tuesday. That plan was for a quarterback of Rodgers’ caliber, not one making his first career start. In hindsight, LaFleur says, they should’ve scrapped the plan altogether. They stuck with it and the Chiefs pressured Love into oblivion.

“I still beat myself up over that,” LaFleur said, “because that could potentially ruin the guy.”

Yet it was how Love tried to make plays against LSU and how he persevered through the disaster in Kansas City — some of his lowest moments — that might’ve proven more to the Packers than his highest. Even last season, Love weathered a miserable first half to become arguably the NFL’s best quarterback in the second half of the season and lead the Packers to a surprise Divisional Round appearance.

Peyton Manning, who called the Packers’ Week 5 loss against the Raiders on ESPN’s ManningCast last season, has developed a relationship with Love and was impressed with how he responded to that dud and subsequent ones in the first half.

“That didn’t break him,” Manning said. “That didn’t put him in a hole or in a shell and it goes back to my rookie year. I mean, I threw 28 interceptions. We only won three games and look, it was bad. It was no fun. It’s the kind of season that can kinda break you … the next year, we went 13-3 and I had a good season, so I kinda used that season to learn what I could do and what I can’t do and I think Jordan used the early part of the season to kind of learn to figure some things out and he continued to get better and to me, that’s a great quality.”

That ability to counter challenges with an impressive calm, whether on the field or off, was instilled in Love by his parents. His mom, Anna, and late father, Orbin, were police officers. They witnessed tragedy at work but put that aside at home to parent Love and his three sisters.

Orbin was a youth pastor at the family’s church, too, one of the calmest people Love said you’ll ever meet, always had a smile and tried to help others.

“There’s so many situations that came up with kids at church and just different upbringings of people and things that might (be) going on with their family and you just gotta be calm,” Love said. “Seeing him kind of react to any situation and find an answer for it or solution for it definitely has helped me in my life and football and it’s like being a quarterback. You plan for certain things to go right on a play and you gotta react to what the defense is doing and be as calm as possible and just kind of have a solution for everything, so it definitely applies on the football field.”

Love’s composure in the face of adversity — the LSU blowout, the Chiefs onslaught, sitting for three years, last season’s slide, you name it — helped him earn a four-year, $220 million contract extension that ties him for the highest-paid player in NFL history.

When Rodgers texted Love in late July, he didn’t say that he’d get Love ready to play or that they’d have fun like he did on that April morning in 2020. Instead, Rodgers offered congratulations on a payday for which he takes no credit. They had their fun, even if the quiet fines got old, and Rodgers certainly prepared Love to play. He won’t buy Rodgers’ primary home in Green Bay, but Love has done all right taking over his other one.

“I just take moments to be like, ‘Man, I’m an NFL starting quarterback,’” Love said. “‘I’m living the dream.’”

On Friday in Brazil, Love will again take the field against the Eagles. This time, it won’t be as an unproven emergency plan. One of the most controversial draft picks in recent history is the face of the sport’s most storied franchise now.

The Packers just might have done it again.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)