Jordan Love is crossing over

The Packers’ 34-13 win over the Cardinals in Week 6 gave us a lot of things.

We saw Romeo Doubs conduct a one-man, one-game redemption tour. We saw Josh Jacobs violently run through tackles. We saw Evan Williams effectively and legally punch another player. We saw Kyler Murray run around like a toddler with candy he wasn’t supposed to have, except unlike an escaping toddler he didn’t actually get anywhere.

We also saw the first great Jordan Love performance of 2024, which in and of itself is wonderful to see. Love was on point with his throws and timely with his pocket movement and scrambles, looking more like his late-2023 iteration than he’s been to this point. His bomb to Christian Watson is probably his best single pass of the season (though hardly his only great one) and his virtually blind but actually very fundamentally sound throw that resulted in Doubs’ second touchdown is easily my favorite.

Contained in that overall excellent, though, is a hidden and even better development: Love has passed Aaron Rodgers in an important metric.

I’ve mentioned this many times, but I love Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt as an all-purpose quarterback stat. I think it encompasses a player’s overall performance better than just about any number out there, and you can read more about why here.

If you click that link and view the accompanying chart, you might notice something important. If you don’t (or maybe just missed it) let me point it out for you: for the first time in his career, Love is meaningfully ahead of Rodgers in their respective 16-game ANY/A rolling totals.

Over his past 16 games, Love has posted an ANY/A total of 7.21 yards. Over the same 16-game span in his career, Rodgers’ 16-game ANY/A total was 6.79 yards. That’s the first time he’s ever led Rodgers by more than .08 yards in that category and only the second time he’s led Rodgers at all.

I mentioned on an episode of Blue 58 earlier this season that we should expect to see Love start to take off into more elite levels of the ANY/A stat this season if his development is going to track with Rodgers’, and so far that looks to be exactly what we’re seeing. I don’t know if he’ll stay ahead of Rodgers, and we probably have good reason to doubt that he will. Rodgers is a surefire Hall of Famer, a four-time MVP, a Super Bowl winner, and a Super Bowl MVP. Though anything could happen, it’s probably not super likely that Love is going to match that resume. 

But it’s really encouraging to see Love take steps like this, and lagging indicators like his 16-game ANY/A totals are important signs worth monitoring. Love is headed in the right direction, and the numbers seem to indicate he’s crossing over into elite territory.