Something is different in Green Bay this year, but that's not unusual.

In 2019, the season started with something different: a new head coach. For the first time in more than a decade, there was a new head man on the sideline to begin the season. That's about as different as it gets.

Well, it would have been, until 2020, when we started with something truly different: a pandemic. Nobody has ever seen a football season like 2020, and hopefully we never will again. 

In 2021, there was another different kind of vibe about the Green Bay Packers. Aaron Rodgers and the team's front office could barely conceal their disdain for each other, and that tacit malevolence appeared tangible on the sideline late in the Packers' Week 1 loss to the Saints. (In a game held in Jacksonville because of a hurricane, don't forget! That's about as different as it gets.)

In 2022, after an offensive facelift, things once again felt different — though not in a good way, as the team floundered through a Week 1 loss to the Vikings.

And then here we are in 2023, with another different feeling team. The drama of the offseason is behind us. The years-long storyline of if and when Aaron Rodgers would leave the Packers has finally been put to rest. Jordan Love is here. And it's different.

But, I would argue, for the first time since 2019, it feels like things are different in a good way.

There is less tension around the Packers this year than in recent seasons. There is no lingering storyline from the offseason to cloud the regular season. There is no current dispute between a star player and team management. Not that we know about at least. There's just the start of something new, something different. 

And it's refreshing! It's promising. It's good.

Jordan Love has looked solid to this point, though doing good things in the preseason counts for exactly nothing. I will refer those of you old enough to remember back to Brett Hundley's 2015 preseason performance and ask you how much that actually showed us about what he could do in the NFL. But still, Love appears to have made strides, and he enters 2023 with the full confidence of the coaching staff and front office and a locker room full of devoted teammates. 

That alone seems different enough to be noteworthy heading into this year, and if he manages to deliver on the promise he's shown to this point, we'll soon find out if this season is, in fact, the good kind of different.

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