Should Vikings Fans Fear Jordan Love?
On July 26th, Jordan Love and the Green Bay Packers agreed to a 4-year, $220 million deal, which will make him the highest-paid player in NFL history by average annual value.
From one perspective, the deal makes sense for the Packers: in his first year as a starting QB, Love led Green Bay to within 15 minutes of an NFC Championship berth.
In the wild-card game against the Dallas Cowboys, he had one of the greatest QB performances in NFL history, posting a Total QBR of 99.3—the highest mark of any QB in a playoff game since ESPN invented the metric in 2006.
From another perspective, however, the contract represents a big risk from Green Bay: Love has been a starter for only one season, and at times during that season, his performance was shaky at best.
To see why Love is such a tough case to predict, comparing his first year as a starting QB to those of Patrick Mahomes and Robert Griffin III is helpful.
All three of these QBs had excellent first seasons, but after that, the paths of Mahomes and Griffin diverged sharply: Mahomes has won three Super Bowls and may win even more in the years ahead, while Griffin started only 43 games in his entire NFL career, due in part to his struggles with injury. Love’s future, of course, is still to be determined.
The plot below shows the passer ratings for Love, Mahomes, and Griffin in each of their games in their first season as starting QBs:
As shown in the plot, Love has, at times, played like the next Mahomes: in eight of his 18 games as a starting QB in 2023, Love had a passer rating above 110. That sort of elite QB play wins championships.
But unlike Mahomes—and like Griffin — Love also had a sizable number of games (six) with a QBR below 80. This wide spread in past performance translates into a wide range of future outcomes.
This can be seen more clearly by including the career passer ratings of Robert Griffin III (86.5), Kirk Cousins (98.2), and Patrick Mahomes (103.5) in the plot above. From this plot, we see that an RG3-like career trajectory is still very much in play for Jordan Love, whose career passer rating is currently sitting at 94.0. The spread in his performance is simply too large, and the sample size of a single season is too small to rule out the possibility of decline.
Love supporters may point to his strong finish to his 2023 campaign as evidence of his progress throughout the season; historically, however, late-season performance has been an unreliable indicator of future success.
Robert Griffin III had a passer rating above 101 in five of the last six games of the 2012 season en route to an Offensive Rookie of the Year award, yet his second year in the NFL was disappointing, and he never recovered the magic of his rookie season.
Maybe Love will be the next Mahomes, or more accurately, the next Brett Favre or Aaron Rodgers. But it’s not unreasonable for Vikings fans to hope that the Packers may come to rue his contract for years to come.
Editor’s Note: Information from ESPN helped with this article.
Decoding Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s Playbook