Jordan Love giveth, Jordan Love taketh

As the Green Bay Packers search for ways to improve their consistency coming out of the bye week, the answer may be in Jordan Love's hands.

There was no victory Monday for the Green Bay Packers to celebrate as they enter their bye week with a 6-3 record and on the heels of a humiliating 24-14 loss to the NFC North-leading Detroit Lions at Lambeau Field Sunday.

The loss itself showed the difference between the Packers and the Lions and how much more the former have to go in becoming an elite team to possibly vie for a Super Bowl as soon as this year. There may be only one person that could single-handedly raise the Packers on his own terms. 

It’s been far from a smooth season for Packers quarterback Jordan Love.

He avoided serious harm when he suffered an MCL sprain in the Packers’ season opening loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in Sao Paulo. Now, he’s been dogged by a nagging groin injury in the Packers’ last two games and the Packers even had to summon Malik Willis to relieve Love in the second half of the Packers’ 30-27 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 8. 

The combination of lower-leg injuries has complicated the conversation around his second season as a starter. Through his seven games this season, Love has completed 61.3 percent of his 240 passes, thrown for 1,820 yards, 15 touchdowns and 10 interceptions. Love’s penchant for throwing interceptions not only leads the league, but his two pick-sixes has him tied with Will Levis of the Tennessee Titans for most in the NFL too. That’s not the company that you want to be with. 

His latest demoralizing pick-six occurred in the final minute of the first half and put the Lions up 17-3. The decision making was exacerbated by Love’s struggles scrambling outside of the pocket on a bad groin and trying to pick out Josh Jacobs within a thicket of white jerseys. Instead, Love lobbed it up to Lions premier safety, Kerby Joseph, who took it all the way to the opposite endzone. 

The questions keep coming and Love’s struggles are the exact fodder that will fuel hour-long discussions on Wisconsin sports talk programs and Packers podcasts (P.S. subscribe to Talk of the Tundra). 

Higher expectations have come for Love after a strong end to his first year as a starter and getting rewarded with a four-year, $220 million contract extension that ensured that he’s the face of this era for the Packers. Love hasn’t exactly regressed, per se, but the consistency that he showed as the Packers roared back in the playoff picture late last season has been undone this season. The peaks and valleys are Grand Canyon sized. 

Love can dazzle with spectacular throws that leave us all slack-jawed. Think back to the bullet pass he completed to Tucker Kraft in the first half of the Packers’ comeback win over the Texans in Week 7. Few quarterbacks in the NFL not only would attempt that pass, but complete the throw to its intended target. Despite being a fingernail away from the throw getting tipped or worse, falling in the hands of the Texans defender. 

After years of being accustomed to a risk-averse quarterback like Aaron Rodgers, Love has brought the Packers back to a more familiar territory.

Love plays a high-stakes game and the team will now live and die with the results. Love’s audaciousness is both his blessing and his curse. What will truly separate him from being special or make him a mere mortal from game to game or even drive to drive. The on-field comparisons with Brett Favre are justified when Love’s performance markers stack up next to Favre. Like this excerpt from ESPN’s Rob Demovsky: 

“Love became the first Packers quarterback to have multiple interceptions returned for touchdowns within the first nine games of a season since Brett Favre in 2001.

And Love's seven-game interception run is the longest single-season streak by a Packers quarterback since 2005, when Favre had one in 10 consecutive games on the way to a career-high 29 picks.”

What ails Love and what is holding him back in making a bigger leap from last year to this season is far more nuanced 280-character posts or 10-minute radio segments. It’s clear he’s trying to do too much and is always in search of making the play, risks be damned. Are his injury woes heightening that? The clear answer is yes, but that is essential to how Love has carried himself, no matter an MCL sprain and/or a nagging groin issue.  

Going from good to great was always the biggest issue the Packers had to tackle after being the first seventh seed in NFL history to win a playoff game and come within a quarter of the NFC championship last year.

The unlikeliness of those feats obscured the struggles that the Packers and Love personally went through in the first half of the season. At this same time last year, the Packers were 3-5 and coming off a 20-3 rebound win over the Los Angeles Rams where Brett Rypien started in place of injured Matthew Stafford. 

The Packers are not the same team from where they were during the first half of last season. Yet the same costly errors and self-inflicted mistakes remain, which comes courtesy of The Athletic’s Matt Schneidman. It’s clear at the halfway point of this season that the Packers themselves remain the biggest obstacle standing in their way of achieving a playoff berth, winning playoff games and possibly going to New Orleans in February.

Their loss to the Lions was the biggest indication that their struggles are bigger than just one person. 

Meanwhile, the bye week will buy Love some much-needed time to heal from his injury struggles and help him recalibrate from a first half of games that gave us everything we did and didn’t want to see. Reining in his decision making will be harder to do than said when Love is hardwired to always make the next play.

The high wire act will continue for Love and the Packers and it’s just a matter of continuing to walk that tightrope towards success.