What is the best system to build around Jordan Love? Coaches, players, and evaluators can't agree

Jordan Love failed to take the jump many predicted for the Packers quarterback in 2024, but is that because Green Bay's offense doesn't fit him?

Jordan Love ducked in under center deep in his own territory, inside his own 10-yard line. Over 70,000 red-and-white wearing Kansas City Chiefs fans pummeled him with a wall of sound Love said was so loud he couldn’t hear himself bark out the signal. Then he did something he had barely done his entire life: took a seven-step drop with a play-action fake, then ripped a deep out route, this one to Davante Adams.

It’s not the kind of offense in which Love thrived while at Utah State, a spread-em-out, shotgun style that ran variations of four verticals on seemingly every play.

Love’s transition from college to the pros didn’t come with the same fanfare as most first-round picks because the Green Bay Packers were still working through their own paradigmatic changes with the starter at the time. You remember him.

In his debut as a starter, Love played in an offense built for 2021 Aaron Rodgers; Love was only playing because Rodgers was out with COVID-19, kicking off one of the strangest chapters in Rodgers’ long history as a world-famous athlete.

Rodgers wanted to be in a spread-em-out system too, living in the Mike McCarthy world where the entire defense was in front of him, motion stayed in the ocean and out of pre-snap receiver movement, and Rodgers could use his cadence to manipulate opponents into giving away all their secrets.

Rodgers, the four-time MVP, future Hall of Fame inductee, and line-of-scrimmage siren.

That wasn’t Matt LaFleur’s background, though, coming from the Kyle and Mike Shanahan version of the West Coast offense as opposed to the McCarthy version. The Shanahan tree wanted to get under center, run outside zone, and play-action defenses to death.

In retrospect, the winging over LaFleur’s schematic fit with Rodgers was an enormous waste of time, not only because it produced back-to-back MVP seasons, but because the offense has evolved in astonishing ways since LaFleur arrived, even from MVP season to MVP season. That’s before he reworked the offense on the fly to accommodate a first-time starter, then had to throw the playbook out, fire up some Oklahoma high school tape, and run the single wing for Malik Willis.

LaFleur, it turns out, is really good at this. Which is why it stood out when a quote popped up in Mike Sando’s QB Tiers piece for The Athletic, wondering if LaFleur’s system held Love back.

“He has a mastery of their offense, he handles multiple cadences and tempos well, and if anything, I think his growth is stifled a little by playing the coach’s offense as opposed to doing more of what Jordan would excel doing.”

This is what critics of the LaFleur-Rodgers pairing said about the Packers head coach before we’d even seen Rodgers take the field. Why would LaFleur, a first-time head man and second-year playcaller, force Rodgers to play in an offense that Bobby Wagner recently described as the coach thinking for the quarterback?

It’s an offense made to prop up Jimmy Garoppolo and Brock Purdy, not to maximize Rodgers or Love.

One pass-catcher who played on the Packers team when Love started in Kansas City, told The Leap he believes Love could operate effectively in an offense that allowed him to play more like the way we think of Rodgers before LaFleur. The player added he believes Love has improved considerably at playing the way LaFleur prefers with a heavy run game and play-action approach.