GREEN BAY, Wis. — Watch Jordan Love one day, and he will look miles away from being the Green Bay Packers‘ starting quarterback. Come back the next day, and he will look ready right now.
Such was Love’s first two days of the team’s mandatory minicamp — their first without camp holdout Aaron Rodgers. How does that bode for Love’s chances if he has to start the regular-season opener Sept. 12 at New Orleans should Rodgers’ tenure with Green Bay be finished?
Love said he will be ready.
“A hundred percent,” Love said when asked if he is prepared to be the Week 1 starter. “Obviously, this is a time where I’m getting a lot of extremely valuable reps that I might not have been getting in a normal circumstance. So I’m just going to take it day by day. … But yeah, that’s what I’m here for. I was drafted here to play quarterback, so I’ll definitely be ready Week 1.”
The Packers’ 2020 first-round pick, the one they traded up to get and therefore start the clock on Rodgers’ eventual end in Green Bay, sure looked ready on Wednesday.
One day after he struggled with accuracy and barely completed more than half of his throws, Love shined.
It started with a 30-yard pass down the right sideline to running back AJ Dillon and got better from there. There was a Rodgers-like free play for a 45-yard deep ball to Allen Lazard, a deep corner route dropped perfectly into the hands of wide receiver Juwann Winfree for another 30-yard pickup and a carbon copy of the Dillon throw to Aaron Jones for another 30.
Love was so hot with his throws that at one point tight ends coach Justin Outten pretended to use his play card as a fan to cool off the quarterback.
“Listen, you can never get too high and never too low in this game,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur said after practice. “One of the biggest emphasis for Jordan is just to treat each play as its own entity. We’re always grading the decision-making, the timing, the accuracy, and we want to see the consistency just continue to get better and better.”