Jordan Love Ends Disappointing Season With Miserable Playoff Performance

PHILADELPHIA – Flash back to one year ago.
The Green Bay Packers were the youngest team in the NFL, playing in the playoffs for the first time with Jordan Love as their starting quarterback.
They were on the road, facing the NFC East champion in a game nobody expected them to win.
Love responded by playing lights-out football, as he had done for the last month of the season.
Love’s QBR in the game was 99, the highest in NFL history. He threw three touchdown passes as the seventh-seeded Packers blew away the Dallas Cowboys.
This year, the circumstances were similar, but the results were drastically different.
Love entered the game with a passing offense that was described both by him and the head coach as “stagnant” following a 24-22 loss to the Chicago Bears one week ago.
During Sunday’s NFC wild-card playoff game against the Philadelphia Eagles, it took the Packers more than three quarters to score a touchdown.
Sunday’s game started as catastrophically as you could imagine in your worst nightmares.
If coach Matt LaFleur wanted his team to come out with its “piss hot,” it instead came out colder than the most frigid days of a Wisconsin winter.
Keisean Nixon fumbled the opening kickoff, which gave the Eagles the ball at the Packers’ 28. Three plays later, Jalen Hurts’ touchdown pass to Jahan Dotson gave the Eagles a 7-0 lead before the Packers quarterback could touch the ball.
A 7-0 deficit in the first quarter should not feel like a death sentence.
After all, the Packers have a quarterback they paid $220 million in the offseason.
The same quarterback who finished last season as one of the hottest passers in the NFL.
However, his inaccurate finish of the regular season continued into the playoffs. His first pass did not inspire much confidence, as it sailed over the head of his intended receiver.
The Packers trailed 10-0 at halftime. His first half was as poorly as he’s played in his career.
Love finished the regular season with zero interceptions in the final seven games. But he threw two in the first half against the Eagles, including one that hit linebacker Zach Baun right between the 5 and 3 on his jersey.
Turnovers are the name of the game in the postseason, and the Packers were minus-3 before the game even went to halftime.
Two of those fell solely on the shoulders of the quarterback who the Packers are paying to be great in big games.
Worse, he did not make any big plays to offset his big mistakes. He was 9-of-15 for 70 yards and two interceptions in the first half.
He finished the game with zero touchdowns and three interceptions, ending the day with a game-sealing, desperation-mode heave in the direction of Bo Melton.
Sure, by the end of the game, Love was playing with a MASH unit on the offensive line and with Melton and Malik Heath as the only receivers.
Ideal?
No, but that’s the burden of being a franchise quarterback in the NFL.
Winning, and playing great, is what’s expected from quarterbacks in Green Bay.
Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers dug out of holes in similar situations to the one Love found himself in on Sunday.
The situations were more ideal in big games during the regular season, but Love didn’t play well enough to win any of them.
Accuracy, which was inconsistent all season, and decision-making, which was a problem during the first half of the season, plagued him against the Eagles.
Two of his three interceptions were not egregious, but the one before halftime to Baun was.
“We made an adjustment on one of our plays in quarters coverage. It was a bad adjustment,” LaFleur said.
“The hole was there to go where he went. I don’t know about the timing of the play and making sure that we got the right route depth and whatnot. Zach Baun is a heck of a player. He ended up falling off into the window, so I think that was more of a schematic thing and less of a player-performance thing.”
LaFleur was going to bat for his quarterback, and maybe it was a great play by Baun.
Love’s feeling was much simpler.
“I was going to throw it and he sunk back into the window, and I obviously didn’t see him (and) I threw it right to him.”
At the end of the game, the Packers were minus-4 in the turnover department, with three of those turnovers coming on the shoulders of Love.
They did not make enough big plays down the field to offset the big mistakes made by their quarterback.
Love finished 20-of-33 for 212 yards and three interceptions. His 41.5 passer rating was the worst in Packers playoff history for a quarterback with 20-plus passing attempts.
It was far cry from his playoff debut in the wild-card round last year, when Love’s 157.2 mark was the highest for a visiting quarterback in a playoff game in NFL history.
As a result, the Packers are going home before the Super Bowl for the 14th consecutive season.
Perhaps Love put it best at the end of his press conference.
“Yeah, not good enough,” Love said pointedly. “I think that’s kind of the main factor in a lot of the losses we had was just not good enough, not able to get the job done. And pretty much the same thing tonight. It’s disappointing.
“I think we did a lot of good things this year; I think there’s a lot of things that we didn’t do as good and we need to find ways to improve on. Anytime you aren’t holding that Super Bowl trophy up and having that be the end of your season, it’s tough and it’s disappointing. I think we’re a really good team. There’s a lot of things we kind of just hurt ourselves in a lot of areas. It sucks. It sucks right now but we’ll be back. We’ll find ways to get better and attack this offseason.”
That offseason started prematurely, as the Packers took a step backward with a first-round playoff exit.
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The #Packers have wasted another season. That's 14 years and counting without a Super Bowl.
— Bill Huber (@BillHuberNFL) January 13, 2025
A season that started with high hopes and talk of a Super Bowl ended with two more wins but a one-and-done playoffs. ⬇️https://t.co/ANVTpUyG4Z
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