What happened last year for Jordan Love, the Green Bay Packers, doesn’t tell the whole story

Don’t confuse what was true last year with what is true about Jordan Love and the Green Bay Packers for 2025 and beyond. You are Locked On Packers, your daily Green Bay Packers podcast, part of the Locked On podcast network. Your team every day. You are locked on Packers, part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. I’m Peter Bowski and I cover the Packers for the Leap, a newsletter I would love for you to subscribe to. Follow me on Twitter, peter_bukowsky. Follow the podcast on Twitter, Locked OnPackers. Like us on Facebook, subscribe to the podcast, iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, wherever you find podcasts, you will find Locked on Packers, the number one Packers podcast on the internet. on the show. For fans who know what happened, they want to know why and how. Thanks to everyone who makes Locked on Packers their first listen every day. We hope you like starting your day with us as much as we like starting our day with you. Today’s episode brought to you by FanDuel. Right now, new customers can get $150 in bonus bets when your first $5 bet wins. Last year looked different in concerning ways for Packer fans and in ways that opposing fan bases have glombmed on to have decided that they’re going to take and and hold on to as much as possible. And the big one last year was can’t win the big game. And we’ve talked about this before. Uh in 2023 they had no problems winning the big game. They won a bunch of them and they ultimately ran into a 49ers team that required them to play a better than they did game. They played a a B B minus game against that 49ers team and still almost won it. They needed to be play they need to be playing a B+ a minus a game. if they if they bring their aame against that 49ers team, they win because the 49ers did not have their their a stuff. And and I think that there were some there were some weaknesses there that the Packers weren’t in a position to exploit. Let’s not fall down that rabbit hole too quickly. Let’s not confuse because I I think the more I’ve thought about why are people looking at last year and projecting things forward into 2025 and how are they coming to that conclusion and I think that they have overindexed things that happened last year when we also saw this team play in 2023. Let me give you an example. In 2024, Jordan Love had 10 touchdowns and five interceptions when he was blitzed. Not Not great. That’s a lot of interceptions. Then that has led to a narrative of, “Oh, you can blitz Jordan Love. He will throw the ball to the other team.” Except in 2023, Jordan Love had eight touchdowns and just one interception when blitzed. According to True Media, he had the second most yards in the NFL against the Blitz in 2023. What is true about Jordan Love versus what was true about Jordan Love? And and it is why I understand people want to say, “Oh, you’re a Homer. You’re defending him.” No. Last year, the injury clearly affected Jordan Love. go back and look at 2023 and if you want to be maximally charitable here, you can say, well then maybe Jordan Love this offense, maybe they’re not what they were in 2023. Maybe they’re not what they were in some of the other, you know, opposite ways in 2024. We’ll learn in 2025. Sort of the rubber match of these two seasons. But here’s the thing. They’ve been good offensively both years. Jordan Love has been good. In fact, very good statistically in both years. How about another example, shall we? 2024, Jordan Love threw four interceptions when he was hit. Four. You can’t you can’t blame him getting hit. Guy in your face. Get the ball out. Okay. In 2023, he was one of only four full-time starters to not throw a single interception when he was hit. Not one. So, does he have a problem or did he have a problem in the aggregate? What does the tape say? What does the data say? We can do this with man coverage, too. Christian Watson a big part of that, to be sure. We talked about the man coverage yesterday and why I’m still a little bit dubious about Dantavian Wixs taking a more full-time role in all of that. In 2023, only Dak Prescott threw more touchdowns against cover one than Jordan Love. Jordan Love threw the same number of touchdowns against man coverage in 2023. His first year as a starter throwing to rookies and secondyear players as Patrick Mahomes. And among quarterbacks with at least as many starts as Jordan Love, only Jared Goff has thrown fewer interceptions against man coverage the last two seasons. So, do the Packers have a man coverage problem? Does Jordan Love have a man coverage problem? First of all, the answer to the Jordan Love part is clearly not. And second of all, the answer is if the Packers do have a man coverage problem, it is not a Jordan Love problem. And this is the point that I have tried to make over and over. The Packers are not a perfect team. But what flaws they do have offensively are by and large not a product of Jordan Love. And so when we try and project this forward, one of the reasons why offense is sticky, one of the reasons why yeartoyear you tend to be able to say we can predict what this offense is going to look like based on what we saw last year, coach, quarterback, their impact, their imprint on an offense is profound. And so, you know, we talked yesterday defensively about um the volatility of turnovers and the sustainability of uh the the process of of their, you know, the game planning and and what made them successful. Nothing fluky in here from Jordan Love, certainly. And so when we look at what happened last year, we don’t even have to be overly generous and say, “Well, that one might be a fluke.” No, that let’s let’s count that those things happened, but then don’t not count what happened the year before. Don’t not count that because it it it does count. There’s there’s this um style of parenting now or at least a line I heard about parenting about you know you you want to try to avoid maybe I’m butchering this so let let’s let’s go on this journey but saying things like you are smart to your child rather than defining the specific behavior. can set them up to when they don’t feel smart, it it it hurts their sense of self. This idea of well, you are this thing, so why am I not this thing? And it it brings shame and and all these things. Whether or not you you agree with that style of parenting is relevant to this example. Sometimes you are something in the moment and sometimes you were something. There is are as in a perpetual state. You are a thing. You will always be a thing. I think we have to be very careful with saying any of those things when it comes to professional athletes. Now, when you have long like we knew what Aaron Rogers was for a long period of time. We knew what he was good at. We knew how teams were going to try and attack him. And then it it did evolve over time late in his career. Like the book on Aaron Rogers for a long time was you cannot blitz Aaron Rogers. You have to rush him with a four. But late in his career, you could because he didn’t want to get hit. Still doesn’t want to get hit. So those things can and do change. So we have to be constantly updating what we’re seeing, what we’re thinking. Just because something happened last year does not mean that it is not to, you know, too philosophical about the nature of being here. The Packers had a problem with man coverage last year. Do they have a problem with man coverage? Jordan Love had a problem throwing the ball to the other team, particularly when pressured last year. But does Jordan Love have that problem? He didn’t in 2023. So what was different? Well, his receivers couldn’t stop dropping the ball and he was hurt. So what is the most likely explanation here? This is AAM’s razor. What is the most likely explanation? Well, it’s that what was happening when he was healthy is probably the more representative sample here. Now, we’ve talked about this defense and the volatility of turnovers and all those things, but I want to talk specifically about Xavier McKini because he was an allp pro last year and we have seen the Packers make a free agent signing, have an allp pro season, and then it goes to hell in a hand basket. Is that going to happen to Z McKini? Summer sports are in full swing. And whether you’re about baseball under the lights, golf on the green, high stakes soccer action, horse racing, FanDuel is the best way to make every game even more exciting. You’re already following the action. Why not make it a little more thrilling with FanDuel? You can get in on the game while your friends are getting sunburned at the beach. There’s tennis to wager on right now. We’ve had some good tennis lately, too. So when you win fast payouts, it makes even those dog days of summer baseball games or those early rounds of a tennis tournament. Maybe you throw a little money on the early rounds of a golf tournament like a Thursday head-to-head perhaps. That is those are those are fun. I’ll be honest, I like those. Go check them out. Lots of ways to win at FanDuel. Open the FanDuel app and new customers can get $5. Excuse me. New customers who bet $5 can win. You can get way more than five bucks. Win $150 in bonus bets if you place that first $5 bet and you win. Go to fandel.com to get started. I went back and watched Xavier McKini because I feel like I’ve I’ve said a lot and I’ve written a lot for the LEA newsletter. I would love for you to subscribe to about how what the Packers did last year without elite corner play, without elite corner talent and without elite pass rush to have such a good passing defense was predicated on the play of Xavier McKini. And it would be natural to wonder, okay, what happens if you don’t have Xavier McKini back there or you don’t have the the 2024 version of Xavier McKini? Like if the Packers in 2022 had gotten the 2021 version of Devandre Campbell, they would have been a better defense. And if they’ve gotten that version in 2023 in the playoffs, who knows? Who knows? But I went back and and look, he’s all over the place early in the season. And you can see teams are like, if you’re going to play single high, we’re gonna test you deep. And there are times when Xavier McKenna, even out of like mediocre pre-nap disguises, is just so on top of whatever the concept is that he’s all over the plane and is able to make a play on the ball. His ball skills, he’s he’s not fast. He’s not, but he plays fast. He is the prototype of plays fast because he’s so intuitive, so smart. Frankly, one of the reasons why I I missed on him a little bit in the in the pre-draft process that year, and that’s a long time ago now, but was I was like, I I just don’t know if he’s fast enough. But when you have instincts like that, if you’re going a half step before you might otherwise, you can make up for not having 438 speed. There’s always this conversation Oh, you know, corners, if they run slow, you can just make him a safety. Well, then you have a slow safety. You have to be able to run to make this all work. And he’s not a burner. Evan Williams also, by the way, not a burner. Javon Bullard did he he ran fast. So that it is nice to have that. Keshan Nixon did not run fast, but is fast. Packers do not have a speed problem in their secondary. But you can you can look around the league and you can see clearly production being manufactured by scheme being manufactured by the productivity of others. You can look at defenses around the league and see the productivity of certain defensive backs is really more about the fact that their defensive coordinators, Brian Flores or um you know Mike McDonald in Seattle, they’re able to generate uncertainty in the minds of quarterbacks and that leads to turnovers. That’s not what happened for Xavier McKini last year. He had eight interceptions. Only Kirby Joseph had more last year. First team AllPro. And it wasn’t just the interceptions, but but he had eight. One one of them was on a play where Jeff Hafley sent extra men where he blitzed. Now, that does not include simulated pressures and and the Packers started using more simulated pressures um as the season went on. They they were very big in in disguise. Even when the disguise wasn’t great, it seemed to fool quarterbacks. And so I see no reason why his play would decline. One of the reasons Devandre Campbell had issues was he got old quickly. He was able to play that dime linebacker spot, roam range side to side and make every play while injuries caught up to him. He insists that, you know, he was trying to make up for everybody else not being in the right positions and Joe Barry’s defense. Whether you believe that or not is is kind of beside the point. He has not played well since u that 2021 season in San Francisco either where presumably those guys know that defense a little bit better. or they’re just playing another version of a defense all of them have already been playing. That’s, you know, neither here nor there. But there there’s not a a tape reason, there’s not a statistical reason to expect that his play falls off. Now, if he gets three interceptions, four interceptions instead of eight, how does that change the Packers? I don’t know that it changes that much. He had four in those first four games. They lost to the Eagles anyway. They did not beat the Colts and the Titans because of Xavier McKenny’s interceptions, but that did set the tone in a lot of ways. And and that hay is in the barn. Teams know if you test Xavier McKenna deep. You are playing with the proverbial fire. It doesn’t need to be interceptions anymore. Now he is like a rim protector. That is a deterrent merely by existing. His mere presence because he is a ball hawk. It’s not the same as a linebacker. Devandre Campbell has this breakout season. Okay, how do you how do you account for that? Well, you go after the other linebacker or you go after another weak point on the team. It’s a little different when you’re playing when you’re talking about the post safety on a defense that wants to be a primary primarily single high safety team. It’s hard to attack that post safety when that post safety is really really good. And I made this point before I made it before they they uh we even saw Xavier McKenna on the field. One of the biggest reasons teams could not replicate the Legion of Boom is not because they didn’t have Richard Sherman. It’s not because they didn’t have Michael Bennett and Cliff Averil and and all those guys or Bobby Wagner and KJ Wright. Earl Thomas was everything to that defense. His ability to erase everything on the back end was the thing that made that defense work because we saw it. As soon as he got hurt, the defense fell off a cliff. Richard Sherman continued to be a good player. Bobby Wagner continued to be a good player. They lost E. Thomas and that defense fell apart. Now, that is a a warning sign for the Packers, I think, because defensively, what are you then if you lose a player like Xavier McKenna? Injuries do happen. Who’s going to step in and play? What do you do? Well, you have flexibility. Javon Bullard can go back and play safety with Evan Williams. You you’ve been grooming Kon Adapo. Is he ready to play real snaps? I don’t know. We’ll see. But then if you have to move Javon Bullard, you’ve got all of these players now. You can move Keshan Nixon to the slot. You can play Nate Nate Hobbs in the slot. You’ve got options here. So you’ve got depth. You’ve really got three safeties you feel good about. You got four corners if you include Javon Buller that you feel good about. Javon Buller gets to count twice. So you have the requisite depth that you need to ensure that even if you do lose Xavier McKenna, you can get quality play. Now, are teams going to be as scared of throwing it deep with Javon Bullard or Evan Williams roaming the middle of the field? Probably not. But that’s that’s life with an impact player. If the Cowboys lose Micah Parsons, their pass rush gets a lot worse. If the Vikings offense loses Justin Jefferson, it gets a lot worse. Xavier McKini is one of the best safeties in the league, one of the true fieldtilting safeties in the league. If he gets hurt, it’s going to be a problem for the defense. But the Packers, they have a plan and they and they showed last year. They can be adaptive. They can be malleable. Oh, J. Alexander can’t stay on the field. You got to play some backup corners and and you got to move a a slack corner to the boundaries. Never really done that before. Okay, that’s fine. How about a lot more cover, too? Protect those corners. Cap everything that they’re doing. Let them jam and reroute at the line of scrimmage and use that to your advantage. Well, that’s Jeff Hafley and Jeff Hafley, of course, may not be here long term, but he’s here now and the Packers can benefit. Now, I want to stay on this defense as we close out a lockdown Packers with a point that I wish I’d thought of it. I really wish I’d thought of it. Dominique Foxworth, former Bronco, former Raven Corner, current ESPN personality, analyst, host. Uh he was on Mina Kim show and they were they were ranking projected defensive rankings this year. Who going to be the top 10 defenses this year? And the Packers made both of their top 10 lists. Um, and defense is notoriously difficult to predict and and they made the point about quarterbacks and you know there’s there’s that home base that a quarterback provides that touchdown for everything that you do that makes it sticky in ways that defenses just is not. But Dominique made the point that, you know, this Packers defense for a long time was marked by the perception at the very least. And and look, I said on this show, I said it before last season and I said it before the season before that, I believe. Go back and check. We keep talking about how talented this team, this defense is all the first round picks. But at a certain point, if the guys can’t play, how talented is it really? Right? And I also try and make the point regularly that talent we only use that word when it is unfulfilled. If the talent were realized, we would just call those players good. When you talk about how talented a defense is, we could be talking about, you know, the Eagles, a lot of talent on that defense. But usually what what we’re saying is they could be really good. The Eagles last year were just really good. We’re not talking about the talent on that that defense right now. They’re just great. They’re really really good. Now, they lost some pieces. They lost some talent, but they’re still really good. the Packers for whatever is true about how good the players were. There was talent, there was pedigree, there was investment, free agents, pass rushers, free agent safeties, first round picks, everybody on the defense, either a premium free agent or a first round pick at one point. And they just never never dominated, never never had the kind of productivity, at least in the Matt Laflur era, that they did last year. Top 10 defense by DVOA, top seven defense by DVOA, top five by EPA per play. In the second half, top five even if you take out interceptions or take out turnovers full stop. This version of the Packers is not as talented and not even frankly as good if you just go to a man on the roster. Like the players are not as good. Forget talent. Just not as good. Also not as talented. And yet last year they had their best season in a long long time. And that is a credit to Jeff Hafley. no doubt to to be able to be malleable to change what you’re doing on the fly. Hey, we thought we were going to play this kind of defense. It turns out we needed to play more of this kind of defense. There’s going to be another revolution. And I think right now, if you’re a Packer fan, you have to feel pretty dang good about how you expect Jeff Hafley to tackle that challenge. But it’s also a credit to Brian Gudikens because yes, he he invested a lot of resources into these players. But then like last year in the second half, the best edge rusher on the team was Brent Cox or at least by, you know, production, pressure, score, all that stuff. You found him as an undrafted free agent. Lot of teams could have had Edin Cooper. The Packers got him. He looks if we if we reddrafted the 20 and doing it after a year is is bonkers. But if we reddrafted the 2024 draft right now today, Eden Cooper would be a first round pick. He might be the Packers’s first round pick. Brian Gudikinst put this all together and and a year ago, two years ago, did he think J. Alexander would not be on this team? Did he think Eric Stokes would flame out as ingloriously as he did? And then not even not even the fault of Eric Stokes in a lot of ways, his body betrayed him. His body broke down. He lost some explosiveness which caused him to lose some confidence and he just never developed the ball skills necessary to become an impact corner. The physical tools, the talent was there, the skills weren’t, and he didn’t become a good player. But Brian Gutens has built a roster that has pedigree now everywhere, but also good players. David McKenna, Evan Williams, those guys are good. Nate Hobbs is good. Rashawn Garry is good. Kenny Clark has been good. What is Kenny Clark? If we can use the conception of our first topic, what was Kenny Clark last year? Not very good. But what is Kenny Clark? Over the balance of his career, the answer is a very very very good football player. So, is it more likely that he had a bad year because he was hurt or that he just thinks now? I don’t think the most likely answer is that he just thinks now. But these guys, the big body players, that stuff can just go. I don’t think he’s going to lose the the strength, but the twitch, the get off, the burst, the explosiveness, that stuff at that age. Not that he’s old, younger than me, but with that with that with that amount of miles on his body, came into the league at 20. Sometimes it just goes. Devonte Wyatt talented. Quay Walker talented. Notice I didn’t say good. Talented. This roster is well constructed. Even if they don’t have high le high highlevel players, high-end talent, they don’t have any bad players. And that right now, I think for for the Packers is what gives them a floor of this team, this defense can be really good. And I expect it to not be bad because they just don’t have bad players. Now, if any team has serious injuries, they’re they’re going to have struggles. It is interesting. People are bullish on the Lions defense this year, yeah, they’ve got talent, but they played really well even when they didn’t have talent, which as Dominique pointed out, and I have been pointing out, by the way, for the last year, that’s coaching. If you can get backups to play well in the same system, that’s coaching. It’s not just that, oh, these backups are are like miraculously as good as the starters. No, no, we know they’re not. In some cases, you know, occasionally they are, but for the by and large, they’re not. Aaron Glennon coached his ass off last year and I think that’s gonna be a big problem for them. Jeff Halfley gets to come back. Jeff Halfley gets to be in year two here and hopefully take them to the next level. The the former all pedigree defense is now a little bit more of a no-name defense, mostly a corner, but we’re going to see some turnover here at the defensive line. It’s going to continue to be like this. What can you continue to get from your coaching staff to maximize that is going to ultimately determine how good the Packers team can be in the postseason with this defense and long term. All right, back tomorrow. Much more here on Locked on Packers. Follow me on all the social medias. Follow the podcast on the social medias. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Go watch us over on our YouTube page so you can stay locked on Packers.

Jordan Love had some problems last year, but that doesn’t mean Love has those problems. Confused? You’re not alone. Plus, why Xavier McKinney won’t have a Year 1 like De’Vondre Campbell after earning his All-Pro selection.

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Peter Bukowski, co-founder of The Leap, brings you a daily look at the Green Bay Packers year round with Locked On Packers! Go beyond the latest injury news into what you’re seeing on the field, how it works, and how it might change with new players or against a division rival. It’s the podcast for fans who know what happened, they want to know why and how!

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