That Jordan Love isn’t Aaron Rodgers or Brett Favre is no shame. But the Packers quarterback seems to be fighting an uphill battle for respect by any standard these days.
Lions fans would rather have Jared Goff. Vikings fans would rather have Sam Darnold — or J.J. McCarthy. And Bears fans’ only solace against the Packers these days is that — no matter what happens on Sunday at Lambeau Field — they’d rather have Caleb Williams heading into 2025.
That the Bears are 4-12 and the Packers 11-5 doesn’t matter. The other guys always seems to appear better than Jordan Love. He’s the good-but-not-great quarterback in the right place at the right time. He was paid too soon and paid too much. He’s tied for the second-highest annual salary among NFL quarterbacks at $55 million a year (behind the Cowboys’ Dak Prescott and with the Bengals’ Joe Burrow and the Jaguars’ Trevor Lawrence), but only 13th in the NFL in passer rating (97.3), 12th in passing yards per game (237.1), tied for eighth in touchdowns (25, but with 11 interceptions) and sixth in yards per attempt (8.0).
Love is on a late-season roll. In six games since beating the Bears 20-19 at Soldier Field, Love has a 108.4 passer rating, with nine touchdown passes and no interceptions. Since Terrell Smith intercepted Love at the goal line in the second quarter in Week 11, Love has thrown 166 passes without another pick.
But in that same six-game span, Love still has been only the third-best quarterback in the NFC North, behind the even-hotter Goff (115.2, 16 touchdowns and one interception) and Darnold (115.2, 16 touchdowns, two interceptions). Even the Bears’ Williams is not far behind — a 95.4 passer rating with 10 touchdown passes and one interception in that six-game span.
It remains to be seen if Love is continuing the legacy of all-time greats Favre and Rodgers, who elicited a special kind of respect from coaches they tormented.
“His football intelligence and his IQ … he just toys with you,” Bears defensive coordinator Chuck Pagano said prior to facing Rodgers in 2020. “He stands back there, and he spends all day behind the center, and he’s moving guys around to get man/zone tells — he knows what the hell you’re going to be in. He finds the matchup he wants, then he exploits it.”
Few if any gush about Love like that.
“The accuracy is there. He’s not missing a lot of targets,” Bears defensive coordinator Eric Washington said Thursday when asked about Love. “He knows where he wants to go with the football. He’s diagnosing the coverages, he’s going to his secondary targets and he’s really taking care of the football.”
Love has sustained the Favre/Rodgers legacy in one regard — he has a knack for beating the Bears. Love is 3-0 as a starter against the Bears. Last year he had passer ratings of 123.2 and 128.6 against the Bears, with five touchdowns and no interceptions.
In Week 11 against the Bears, Love completed 13 of 17 passes for 261 yards (15.4 yards per attempt, the second-highest in a game this season), one touchdown and one interception. And he even had the uncanny good fortune that marked Rodgers’ dominance of the Bears — Pro Bowl cornerback Jaylon Johnson falling down on the 60-yard completion to Watson; and Karl Brooks blocking Cairo Santos’ 46-yard field goal as time expired to win the game.
Bears fans will still take Caleb Williams. If anything, Love is another reminder that it’s more that just the quarterback. Love in the hands of Matt LaFleur trumps Williams in the hands of Shane Waldron/Thomas Brown. It’s not enough to get the quarterback right.