Jordan Love's thumb won't change the Packers offense; it had already evolved

In order to play a style suitable for a quarterback with a banged up thumb, the Green Bay offense could keep doing what it had been doing in 2024.

Jordan Love’s injuries last season changed how the Green Bay Packers played, but it didn’t change how they played. Confused? The easy assumption for an injured knee (and then an injured groin) would be to get the offense into shotgun, allow the quarterback not move much, and build the running game off of that. But a funny thing happened on the way to modifying the offense: the running game exploded as Matt LaFleur tinkered with single-wing throwback offense, Love thrived from the gun, and LaFleur had a mid-career epiphany about play-action.

The TLDR: the best offense for Love’s thumb injury is the offense the team was already running and looked to be running back in 2025.

Thumb surgery would be scary news for a quarterback, but it’s on Love’s non-throwing hand, and the expectation is he will be back well in time for Week 1 against the Detroit Lions. But the immediate reaction from a football standpoint might be, “Well, there goes the under-center game the team had to scrap last year with Love’s injury.”

Except that’s not quite what happened.

After a win against the Los Angeles Rams, I asked Love if he felt they could get back to the under-center play-action game once his knee was feeling better, and he insisted he was healthy enough to play that way, but it wasn’t in the gameplan that week.

Last fall, LaFleur offered a candid assessment as to why the play-action game appeared to change: it had.

“Throughout the course of my career (play-action) is off a legit run action, where we’ve kind of gotten away from that where, with those actions, you’ve got a tight end trying to lock down a defensive end,” LaFleur said in November.

“I think a lot of these (edge rushers) nowadays, they’re very tough to block. We’ve kind of gotten a little bit away from that and make sure formationally that we’re presenting the same look as we’re running the football and may be doing more chipping with the tight ends.”

That was in November, but the trend followed through the season and into the playoffs. In 2023, including the two postseason games, Jordan Love ranked fifth in play-action usage among qualified starters, giving a run fake on 26.6% of his passes according to Pro Football Focus charting. Love’s rank plummeted (15th), though his percentage didn’t change all that much at 24.4%.

It’s more important to note the placement relative to his peers because play-action has become such an efficient weapon that not using it can make overall offensive creation more difficult. But that’s not what happened.