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At the end of every week in the fall, Matt LaFleur has his quarterbacks—not just the starter, but all of them—go through the offensive plays in the game plan and rank them. It’s an exercise done chiefly to make sure he, as a play-caller, is aware of what his quarterbacks are comfortable with, and what they’re not. And so came a big moment for Jordan Love.
Love was the backup in the Packers’ Sunday night showdown in Philly last November after Aaron Rodgers injured his ribs on the team’s first possession of the fourth quarter. Green Bay was down 37–23 and, on his fourth snap, Love found rookie Christian Watson on a slant over the middle for a 63-yard catch-and-run score, cutting the lead to 37–30. Philly responded with a field goal to move the score back to 40–30.
And while the Eagles were driving the field, it stuck with LaFleur that he had a call that’d perfectly exploit a loose quarters coverage Philly had been running. The problem? Where it ranked on Love’s list of calls was in, as LaFleur recalls it, territory.
“But I seeing the look for it,” LaFleur says.
So after Love started the next series with a 15-yard throw to Watson and a first-down incompletion, the coach spit into the headset,
Love responded,
The high-low concept worked as LaFleur thought it would. An underneath receiver ran a pivot route (when a receiver breaks sharply over the middle, stops, and cuts back toward the sideline), which put the defender in conflict as Allen Lazard wrapped behind him, and Love delivered a strike to Lazard for a 17-yard gain. From there the Packers kicked a field goal, an onside kick to get the ball back failed and Green Bay lost by a touchdown, 40–33.
But the game, and the moment, would reverberate at Lambeau Field well past Thanksgiving. In fact, in January and February, when Green Bay was mapping out its offseason, and considering the chances that Aaron Rodgers wouldn’t be back, it’d be something coaches and execs could point back to—and feel convinced on, as concerns over whether Love would make it harbored after the quarterback’s second year slowly evaporated in Year 3.
“You can have the best play design, and if the guy’s not confident, whether he’s not comfortable with it or whatever, it really doesn’t matter,” LaFleur says, relaxing under a canopy after a sticky late July practice. “You always want to push your players, and you want to make them uncomfortable. That time is typically in practice. It’s hard to push that on somebody in a game. I was proud he trusted us enough to get him to the right look.
“He went out there and he ultimately executed it.”
And, quietly, he was winning over the staff, too, erasing skepticism and starting to shift the plates under the Packers’ quarterback room for the first time in 15 years.
