Green Bay Packers v. Chiefs: 3 Big Things from Jordan Love’s 1st Start

The Green Bay Packers fall to the Kansas City Chiefs 13-7 in Jordan Love’s first NFL start. The defense kept it close, the offense struggled, and I don’t know what to say about the special teams unit–although I’ll give it a try.

Now that I’ve had time to digest and take a look back, I have my 3 Big Things from the Green Bay Packers’ performance.

Jordan Love makes his first start for the Green Bay Packers

As should have been expected to some degree, there were certainly some deer in the headlights moments for Jordan Love. The nerves and jitters were obvious early on, and throughout the game, there were some inaccurate throws as well.

Overall, Love would finish the game 19/34 for 190 yards with a touchdown, an interception, and a passer rating of 69.5. However, you could really split Love’s performance into two categories: how he performed when he was blitzed and how he performed when there was a clean pocket.

According to ESPN Stats & Info, Love was just 6/17 for 30 yards when he was blitzed–and the Kansas City Chiefs sure blitzed him a lot. But when he wasn’t blitzed and had time in the pocket, Love was 13/17 for 160 yards.

During Green Bay’s first two possessions of the fourth quarter, we saw Love have time in the pocket, and we saw several on-time and in-rhythm passes from him. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the norm. Love still had accuracy issues at times, Kansas City was blitzing non-stop, and in general, it was a rough game for the offensive line.

As he often does, head coach Matt LaFleur would shoulder the blame:

"“Ultimately, it comes down to myself, making sure we have a better plan to handle those pressures. Certainly we did not do that tonight,” LaFleur said via Packers Wire. “If you call long developing plays, and you can’t protect, you can’t throw from your back,” LaFleur would add."

To further critique LaFleur, I understand that Green Bay was playing from behind for much of the game, so especially at the end, that can skew the run/pass stats, but Aaron Jones would average 4.4 yards per rush and AJ Dillon 5.8–these two needed to be involved more. It would have allowed for more play-action, helped open up the passing game, and made life a bit easier on Love.

In the grand scheme of it all, we need to keep in mind that it was only one game–albeit a discouraging one. But this one outing does not provide us with any additional insight into how Love’s career will turn out, and Brian Gutekunst is not making any future decisions based on one performance.

For some context, as Peter Bukowski would point out, during Aaron Rodgers’ first extended playing time in 2005, he would go 8/15 for 65 yards with an interception against Baltimore. In 2006, Rodgers was 4/12 for 32 yards against New England. After just one game we have no idea what Love’s future holds.