Jordan Love will be an all-time great
Tyler Dunne
This is the bar now. Nobody was better from mid-November on. What's next for the quarterback we've trumpeted at Go Long? Greatness, of course. Our 2024 NFL Season Preview series continues.
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Our 2024 NFL Season Preview features are underway.

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No video evidence exists. The workout lives on only in the memories of Jordan Love and his longtime quarterbacks coach, Steve Calhoun.

Usually, there’d be a batch of receivers present to catch passes with Calhoun filming the entire session on his iPad to deconstruct later. But training camp was closing in. Love was leaving California in the morning and simply wanted to sneak in one final training session before the 2024 season began.

So after taping a podcast together, the two headed straight from the studio to the turf practice field at Santa Ana Valley High School in Orange County, Calif. No receivers. No film. Only Love and the man who’s taught him how to play the position since he was 15. A few high schoolers served as eyewitnesses nearby.

Know this: Calhoun is extremely difficult to impress.

Especially when it comes to the kid he has pushed so hard, so long.

“But that workout?” Calhoun says. “I was just looking around, like ‘This is unbelievable.’”

Love simulated play calls and pocket movements/manipulations. Calhoun was his receiver. Standing at various spots all over the field, he held his hands in front of his face, then his chest, then near his right shoulder to pretend a zone defender’s on his left side. Love’s ball arrived— on a rope, every time — directly into his palms. He barely had to move his hands a centimeter. This was the equivalent of Steph Curry walking into a gym and drilling 30 three-pointers in a row. The perfect workout. Everything the two worked on all offseason came to life.

Calhoun knows his protégé must align protections and decode coverages as an NFL starter. But he implored him to remember this feeling. His footwork. His balance. His hip torque. How the ball flicked off his forefinger. Throw to throw, this session was Love’s personal Michelangelo. Throw the ball with this level of accuracy and there was a 0.0 percent chance any NFL defense would stop him this 2024 season.

“I was blown away,” Calhoun says. “I’m stuttering for words right now. … It was amazing. He absolutely crushed that workout.”

Love returned to Green Bay, Wisc., and inked a four-year, $220 million dollar contract.

For three years, he’s been the sport’s greatest mystery. A shadow in the glow of four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers. From unhinged backlash the night he was selected 26th overall by the Packers in 2020 to Rodgers holding the franchise hostage for three months in 2021, to Rodgers then inking a massive contract of his own in 2022, to the Packers finally moving on in 2023, the quarterback has waited. And waited. And now? He’s navigating a Super Bowl contender.

The plan was always genius. Even back to those Bambi rookie days, Love possessed the mentality you cannot coach, in addition to Mahomesian gifts articulated by those who know him best.

After three years perfecting what can be coached — and a stormy 2 ½ months to start the season — Love was unequivocally the best quarterback in the NFL from Week 11 to one fateful throw in the divisional playoff round. It’s silly that a Rodgers or Love? debate even raged outside the building. As we reported, Green Bay was sold. Brian Gutekunst and Matt LaFleur made the ballsy, correct decision. All that was required was a sucker: the New York Jets. Now, the debate that raged this offseason will also look silly. One year from now, everyone will view Love’s $55 million annual salary as a spectacular bargain because the quarterback who disemboweled the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC wild card, who completed 70 percent of his passes for 2,616 yards with 23 scores and only three picks through the 7-3 run to end 2023, who had Calhoun lifting his jaw off the turf is only getting started.

If 2023 was the introduction, this 2024 season marks the coronation of one of the true stars at the most important position in sports. Championships. MVPs. It’s all within reach.

Brett Favre, the icon who resurrected the franchise in 1992, is sold: “I wouldn’t change anything. What I see, I wouldn’t change.”

Mike Tannenbaum, the former NFL GM, is banging the drum. Nor does he give a damn that is his X timeline’s a bloodbath. He warns against “reputational thinking.” Remove all preconceived opinions of Josh Allen and Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson, he begins, and objectively study that 10-game run. The blowout in Dallas, to him, was the equivalent of pitching a perfect game in the MLB postseason.

“If you flew in from another country and watched football for the first time and had to rank the quarterbacks how they played,” Tannenbaum says, “you could easily say that Jordan Love played the position the best.”

David Yost, the QB’s offensive coordinator at Utah State, read Siaosi Mariner’s comment at Go Long, the receiver who politely informed the masses in 2020: “You’re going to get Patrick Mahomes.” And he did not object. It was actually the rest of Mariner’s quote that piqued his interest, the part where Mariner added: “I don’t even want to discredit Jordan. He definitely is his own person.” Yost agrees. Yost sees no cap on Love’s game. We all have palpitations whenever Mahomes hypnotizes DBs with no-look passes and waddles through mosh pits of 300-pounders to gain eight yards on third and 7. But what new standard can Love create? That’s where the discourse is headed now. “He can do anything,” says Yost. “He can do things that other people haven’t done before at the highest level. That’s a special place to be.”

Kurt Warner, the Hall of Fame QB, taps the brakes. He’s not ready to rank Love amongst the league’s best… not yet. He gets why the Packers paid up. Love’s combination of playmaking and smart decision-making is rare.

For three years, Calhoun was the mad scientist in the lab mixing potions. He’s the one who got us to believe. Through the 1,360 total days between Love’s final start at Utah State and his debut as the Packers’ Day 1 starter, Calhoun pleaded for patience. Now, his creation’s unleashed on the league. In full.

“The sky’s the limit,” he says. “He will be one of the top quarterbacks year-in, year-out.”

Favre. To Rodgers. To Love. Green Bay’s desired half-century of quarterback ecstasy is here. Not that anybody inside Lambeau Field was thinking of perennial Super Bowl contention on Sept. 24. As players trudged into the tunnel for halftime of their home opener, they were serenaded with roaring boos typically reserved for poverty franchises.

The Packers were getting blanked by the New Orleans Saints. Lord, it was ugly.

On the first play of the fourth quarter, still down 17-0, a fourth-and-2 pass sailed incomplete. A collective “Ugh!” swept through the stadium. A dejected Matt LaFleur grabbed his knees. A young quarterback unbuckled each chin strap and headed to the bench to study his tablet as more boos rained and fans considered swapping their cheeseheads for ‘Aints-approved paper bags. Then, Love came alive. Love led the second-best fourth quarter comeback in the team’s 103-year history by pioneering 46-, 80- and 80-yard scoring drives. Green Bay won.

That day, coaches and players alike truly started to believe Love was special.

“He didn’t blink the whole time,” said one Packers source who’s around Love daily. “He just kept shooting his shots. That was the moment for him where I saw it click like, ‘Alright, this guy’s got that.’ He’s not going to get discouraged. Whether we’re up 24, down 24, he is going to be the same guy out there. And that’s rare.”

Inside the locker room, LaFleur told players this was the “most resilient performance” he had ever seen in his life.

It wasn’t hyperbole. It was only the beginning.

Here’s what’s coming next.

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