Jordan Love’s 2023 training camp seems to be a bit of an up-and-down adventure.

I say seems to be because making assumptions based on training camp reporting seems to be a pretty flawed idea. Even if you’re in the stands — or the sidelines — every day, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on. Who knows what the coaches are really looking for in a given practice session? Sure, you want to see completions and good decisions, but it’s hard to always know what led to a given outcome in actual games. I’m fine with withholding judgment until we actually see it on the field.

But that’s not to say there’s nothing to like. There is, even if it comes from Love’s coach and not Love himself.

Matt LaFleur seems to have the exact right perspective on Love’s camp, such as it is. What does LaFleur want from Love? Well, even if we don’t know exactly what he and the rest of the coaches are looking for in a given drill, LaFleur helpfully came out and told us he’s looking for Love to operate from the correct process without concern for exactly how each play works out:

Everything that we look at in regards to that position or really all the positions is just the process behind it. I’m not so caught up in the end result right now. Obviously, we are in a results-oriented business, and they are absolutely critical, but I’m just a firm believer philosophically that if these guys have the right process and going through their reads the right way, throwing with the right rhythm and timing, it’s going to lead to a better result. That’s where the sole focus lies with him (Jordan Love) and, frankly, all our players.

That’s an encouraging thing to hear for at least two reasons. First, he’s not getting hung up on exactly what happens on every practice play, which is probably smart given the sheer number of new pieces on the Packers offense. The Packers added two new tight ends and three new receivers in this year’s draft, and Love hasn’t spent just tons of time with the players who carried over from last year’s team. It makes total sense that things might be coming along a bit slowly. This is, in essence, a completely new offense.

But secondly, it’s just generally encouraging to hear LaFleur focus on process over results. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot on Blue 58, and it really boils down to what I call the Process/Outcome Matrix. Here’s what that looks like.

In every situation, you have to grade things by both the process and results. Ideally, you’d have a good process that leads to good results, but sometimes you get unlucky and get a bad result with a good process. That’s life!

Sometimes, though, you get the troubling result of a bad process leading to a good outcome, which generally only serves to reinforce the bad process. There are innumerable situations in just about every industry — sports, business, media, entertainment, you name it — where people fall butt first into success and learn the exact wrong lesson from their success, leaving them unable to replicate it in the future. Catching lightning in a bottle is hard enough when you do it on purpose. Do it by accident and you’ll never be able to do it again.

The worst quadrant here is the bad process/bad outcome corner, which probably will result in you being out of a job. Honestly, that’s probably doing you a favor. Hope you got a good parachute.

Anyway, it’s encouraging to hear LaFleur focusing on the process for Love right now, because the process is going tob e what matters. The process will give Love and LaFleur a framework to build around (provided, of course, that it’s a good process), and the process will give Love something on which to fall back when the going gets tough. 

All the great coaches in NFL history have preached the value of a repeatable process. Bill Walsh’s book “The Score Takes Care of Itself” is premised on the idea that a good process is so valuable to a football team that if you’ve mastered it, the actual score of the game becomes secondary. Vince Lombardi preached the value of repetition and mastering fundamentals. His colleague, Tom Landry, wanted players who were so devoted to his process that he could count on them to think their way around the football field. Bill Belichick’s ferociously detailed process is still duplicated among his disciples even years after they’ve been away from the foot of the master.

That LaFleur is prioritizing Love’s process over results is encouraging, and if the process is sound and Love holds to it, success should follow. Those are some big ifs, of course, but having a process is at the very least better than just hoping for the best.