It’s Love’s Time to Prove He’s Not ‘Wasted’ Draft Pick

Before the 2020 draft, Packers GM Brian Gutekunst said he was willing to take a quarterback in the first round. That quarterback was Jordan Love.

Author:
Bill Huber
Publish date:
Mar 16, 2023 2:14 PM EDT

In this story:

Green Bay Packers

GREEN BAY, Wis. – In a move that was 1,056 days in the making, Jordan Love on Wednesday became the Green Bay Packers' unofficial-official starting quarterback.

While Rodgers, who made public his "intention" to be traded to the New York Jets, might have changed the expected timeline by winning back-to-back MVPs, this was the moment general manager Brian Gutekunst had in mind when, on the night of April 23, 2020 – almost exactly three months after the Packers lost at San Francisco in the NFC Championship Game – he traded up in the first round to get Love, the talented but mistake-prone prospect from Utah State.

I’ll never forget a conversation with Gutekunst a couple months earlier, just before the 2020 Scouting Combine. The Green Bay Press-Gazette’s Pete Dougherty asked Gutekunst whether he’d consider using his first-round pick on a quarterback.

Remember, the Packers finished just one win away from the Super Bowl. Seemingly, a championship was within their grasp. At the same time, Rodgers’ numbers in Year 1 with Matt LaFleur were no better than in 2018, the doomed final season under Mike McCarthy.

In an incredible moment of honesty that, at the time, sounded like complete and total B.S., Gutekunst said: “Sure. You guys have heard me say this before, everything I’ve been taught, that’s where you start, you start with the quarterback. So, you evaluate them every year and I think it’s always on the table.”

Sensing this whole proposition was nonsense, my follow-up was blunt: “Wouldn’t that be a waste of a draft pick?”

Not only would that first-round quarterback not help the team get over the hump in 2020, but there was a legitimate chance that first-round quarterback might never play a meaningful snap with the team.

“It’s a quarterback, you know what I mean? I think it’s such an important part of what makes this thing go,” Gutekunst replied. “The scenario, quite frankly, I don’t know if that’s as important as maybe you think it is. It’s quarterbacks.

“I know what you’re saying. Aaron didn’t play for three years and for three years people were probably saying, ‘Well, that was a total waste.’ I just don’t think developing a young quarterback is a waste. You just don’t know when the time is going to be when you’re going to need him. Or if you’re going to trade him to New Orleans like we did with Aaron Brooks or Matt Hasselbeck to Seattle. You just don’t know when that’ll come. I know this – if you make it a priority to develop quarterbacks, I think it’s going to be a positive for your organization.”

All of this ended, obviously, with the Packers giving up a fourth-round pick to move up from No. 30 to No. 26 to select Love.

For three years, that pick, indeed, was wasted.

Just like in 2019, Green Bay in 2020 won 13 games and reached the NFC Championship Game but lost, this time on the home turf against Tampa Bay. In 2021, Green Bay won 13 games again but was bounced at home in the divisional round by San Francisco. In 2022, the Packers plunged to 8-9.

We’ll never know if those seasons would have ended any differently had Gutekunst stayed at No. 30 and drafted receiver Tee Higgins, who wound up going No. 33 to Cincinnati. Would the Packers, with Davante Adams and Higgins heading a dynamic-duo receiver corps, have reached the Super Bowl in 2020 or 2021? Would the Packers have better handled the trade of Adams with Higgins moving into the No. 1 role in 2022?

On the other hand, would Rodgers have returned to MVP form in 2020 and 2021 without the arrival of Love to light a fire under him? Or would he have played at an elite level, anyway, with the benefit of time and experience in LaFleur’s offense?

That’s just the on-the-field hypotheticals. Would the relationship between the Packers and Rodgers gone south had Gutekunst picked a player at any position other than quarterback? Would they have had to agree to a convoluted $150 million contract had Gutekunst and Rodgers been in lock step, or at least close to it, on key personnel moves?

Of course, there’s no way to answer any of these questions with any certainty.

What seemed obvious at the time was drafting a quarterback in 2020 put Gutekunst in the challenging position of trying to build a championship roster for today while remaining a championship contender in the future.

Being in two places at once is difficult. It’s impossible from a football perspective when just about everything else doesn’t work perfectly.

What followed were two years of personnel missteps.

Look at the 2020 draft. Love, the first-round pick, has barely played. AJ Dillon, the second-round pick, has been OK. Josiah Deguara, the third-round pick, has been nothing more than a role player. There was no fourth-round pick because of the Love trade. Of the six picks over the final three rounds, only guard Jon Runyan has been a hit.

The 2021 draft might not be any better. First-round cornerback Eric Stokes regressed after an excellent rookie season, second-round center Josh Myers has been so-so, third-round receiver Amari Rodgers didn’t last two years, fourth-round lineman Royce Newman was benched, and none of the five picks over the final three rounds is a starter.

Oddly, 2022 was Gutekunst’s best season in terms of the draft and some major hits in bargain free agency, but the team couldn’t overcome the trade of Adams, the departure of Nathaniel Hackett, Rodgers’ broken thumb and an underachieving defense.

Through three seasons, it’s impossible to give Gutekunst’s decision to draft Love anything but an F. Hindsight is always 20/20 but this was foresight. It was a complete and total waste of a draft pick. And it played a role in wasting the remainder of Rodgers’ championship window.

It’s all water over the dam now as we move from the world of hypotheticals to the Packers’ new reality.

After three years getting ready for this moment, it’s Love’s turn. If Gutekunst’s evaluation was right, and if Love is the worthy successor at the most important position in the game, then nothing else matters. If you have the right quarterback, you’ve got a chance to win championships.

Waste of a draft pick? Not if we are sitting here in 2025 and 2028 and 2033 and so on talking about the Packers reloading in free agency for another run at a Super Bowl.

It worked in 2005, when then-general manager Ted Thompson drafted Rodgers with Brett Favre on the roster. Maybe it will work again.

“Nobody would look back and say that’s a bad decision by Ted to do that,” Gutekunst said in 2020. “I don’t know what people were saying about it at the time because I was in North Carolina and that was that. But I imagine at the time some people were pretty up in arms about it. I know there were people in the building that were.

“They were wrong.”