I did a ~30 minute video rundown of all 9 of Jordan Love’s pass attempts against the Eagles. I talk too fast and yet it still feels long. If you’re interested, here it is:
I spent all that time walking through his snaps, but I still wanted to do something in written form as well. Why? A couple reasons:
Not everyone feels like sitting down to watch a 30 minute video.
My face/voice is odd and uncomfortable
Both fair points. So let’s take a walk through them here. We’ll run through each play relatively quickly, then give some wrap-up thoughts at the end. Ready?
Drive 1
Play 1: 2nd & 10, 10:30 remaining in the 4th quarter
Packers are running a quick-out/vertical combo on the right, paired with a dual stick-nod concept on the left, with AJ Dillon releasing as the checkdown on the stick-nod side.
Jordan Love is looking to hit the quick out, but he sees Darius Slay’s [2] position as the boundary corner. He’s parallel to the sideline, looking to trap the quick-out.
Love is loaded & ready to throw, but seeing Slay in that position moves him off of that concept. Love scans the stick-nod concept, sees it covered, then pivots to hit the checkdown.
Beyond the recognition from Love on the initial look, this ends up as a full-field read and sees Love expertly navigating the footwork needed for each potential throw. Really good stuff on this first pass attempt from him in the game.
Play 2: 3rd & 5, 9:44 remaining in the 4th quarter
Packers are running a two-man stick combo on the right - with Randall Cobb having a three-way option route from his #2 spot - and a deep corner route from Christian Watson as the #3 receiver.
The Eagles spin their safeties post-snap from a two-high look to a single-high look. Slay is playing off coverage at the bottom of the screen and is backpedaling at the snap, making this an easy, high-low read for Love. With Slay fading back, that makes the corner route a tough throw, but leaves Allen Lazard open on the quick out.
Love hits Lazard for 7 yards and gets a new set of downs.
Play 3: 1st & 10, 9:10 remaining in the 4th quarter
And what what Love do with that new set of downs? Some pretty nice stuff!
The Packers are running Strike: one of their core concepts. It’s a play action concept - Love’s only play action snap of the night - designed to attack the middle of the field. While there are a couple routes, there’s only one they’re really looking to hit: the dig away from the playfake side.
Love sells the playfake, then quickly spins back to the middle and delivers a strike to Christian Watson, and Watson takes care of the rest. Watson turns on the jets, gets to the edge and he’s gone.
The slight bend at the top of Lazard’s route forces the safety to dip under the route and ends up a little flat on the pursuit. From there, it’s all over.
Love does a really nice job of spinning, loading & firing. No additional hitch. Great footwork, and he puts it right on the money to allow Watson to work after the catch.
Drive 2
Play 4: 1st & 10, 2:09 remaining in the 4th quarter
The Packers kick off this drive with a Curl/Dig combo on the right side, paired with a Divide/Slant combo on the left. The Packers are spread & the Eagles are showing a two-high look, so this makes for an easy read for Love: he’s reading the slot defender on the Curl/Dig. If the curl route holds that slot defender, the middle of the field is open for the dig.
The slot defender is held down, so Love hits the top of his drop and fires on the dig.
He does a good job of not giving anything away during the drop, then setting & firing on the dig. Nice read & timing with an accurate throw.
Play 5: 1st & 10, 2:00 remaining in the 4th quarter
Play of the day, right here. Let’s take it back to Play 1 for a second, and remember what Love saw in the post-snap stance of Slay that forced him off that quick-out. Slay was parallel to the sideline, looking to jump the quick-out.
The Packers come back to that again here, this time pairing it with a Curl/Dig combo on the left (with a deep stop route on the left boundary). Love is looking to hit that out/vert combo on the right. Here’s what we’ve got:
Eagles are showing a two-high look, with Slay playing off on the boundary. Love is reading that right side on the dropback. He sees Slay looking to trap the out and also confirms the split-safety playing over the top.
There’s no hesitation. Love hits the top of his drop and rips this throw over the head of Slay. To account for the safety closing on the vertical route, he throws back shoulder, allowing Aaron Jones to make a clean catch and also to protect him from the safety.
It’s a tremendous read, based off of information the Eagles showed earlier. Beyond that, it’s a perfect throw. A shame Jones couldn’t hang on.
When you really start to dream on what Love could potentially be, this is the play that will stick out to me.
Play 6: 2nd & 10, 1:56 remaining in the 4th quarter
Looking to pick up some yards on 2nd down, they go back to the Curl/Dig combo on the left, and pair it with Stick on the right. Same read as before. Eagles are showing a two-high look, with the middle of the field open. Love is reading the slot defender.
At the snap, the Eagles spin to single-high (with the other safety dropping down on the stick route from Watson on the right) and the slot defender is held in place by the curl. Love reads it, hits the top of his drop and fires on the dig.
Lazard is able to fight for some extra yards after the catch and they end up with 17 yards on the play.
Another nice, simple read and Love shows off good footwork & timing.
Play 7: 1st & 10, 1:46 remaining in the 4th quarter
Packers have a switch vertical release on the left, paired with levels on the right. Down by 10 and the hour getting late, Love looks to the vertical concept first, but finds it covered up.
When he turns his gaze to the middle, he finds that the line is getting shoved back into his face, so he breaks contain to the right. He keeps his eyes downfield and sees Christian Watson breaking to his side, so he rips a throw to the end zone.
The throw is wide. And, though Watson makes a good effort, he’s nowhere near close enough to get a hand on it.
This is one of those scramble drill throws that looks really nice off the hand, but ends up being inaccurate. His only real inaccurate pass of the day. With the defender on Watson’s hip, this is a tougher throw than it may have originally seemed, but it’s still off by a fairly wide margin. I’m certainly not going to kill a guy for not being 100% on the money under these conditions, but it’s a throw that you’d like to see him at least a little closer on.
Play 8: 2nd & 10, 1:39 remaining in the 4th quarter
As you may have gathered, the Packers had Love running a fairly limited playbook, and it shows up here. They go with a Curl/Dig combo on the right, paired with a Divide/Slant combo on the left. The Eagles are showing two-high with some defenders close to the line, but they’ve seen this play enough.
At the snap, the Eagles drop two men from the line back into hook zones and spin a safety down over the Curl/Dig. Love is looking to hit that combo, but he sees it’s off the table during the dropback.
He positions himself to throw to the Divide concept at the top of his drop, but he sees that is gone as well, due in no-small-part to the boundary defender breaking over the top.
That means no one is breaking on the slant, so he repositions his front foot and fires to Robert Tonyan on the slant for 6 yards.
Really nice job from Love in reading the coverage during the dropback and getting his feet in position for every potential throw. A full-field read and the ball is out in 2.6 seconds.
Play 9: 3rd & 4, 1:18 remaining in the 4th quarter
And here we find ourselves, at the end of all things. Packers have a little Middle-Read Dagger look with Tonyan & Cobb as the #3 & #2 receivers on the right, with Cobb riding the wave of Tonyan up the field before breaking off on a deep dig route.
That is paired with an iso route from Lazard on the left and an angle route from Dillon out of the backfield.
The Eagles are showing a two-high look pre-snap, then spin to a single-high look post-snap, with the single-high safety coming from the left side. Love looks at the movement of the safeties post-snap, so he knows there’s no safety help on Lazard. Love must like that iso match-up, because that’s where he’s going first. Love is set to throw, but Lazard can’t get out of the break, so Love is forced to move off of him.
Love briefly scans the angle route on his way to the Dagger concept, but he sees pressure breaking through; both in front of him and to his right. So he steps up-and-out and escapes to the right. Keeping his eyes downfield he sees Cobb and whips a throw to him in the middle of the field.
It’s a tremendous throw, but Cobb is unable to haul it in.
The Packers kick a field goal to get the game to within 7 points, but the Eagles are able to pick up 11 yards in their next three plays, and they are able to get into victory formation to run down the rest of the clock.
So. What do we have?
Two total drives resulting in 10 points. On those drives, Love was 6/9 (66.7%) for 113 yards (12.6 YPA) and 1 TD. With the Jones drop factored in, Love has an adjusted completion % of 77.8%.
Beyond those numbers, here are my overall takeaways from this game in regards to Love.
The Packers obviously didn’t know that he would be playing in this game, so there wasn’t really a gameplan for him. They kept the concepts pretty simple over his 9 attempts, re-using the same couple of core route combos multiple times to allow Love to operate quickly & in rhythm.
With that being said, he operated quickly & in rhythm. He showed good recognition and was able to move through the progression when the initial read wasn’t there. He was able to do that with relative ease, tying his footwork to the reads, which allowed him to always be in position to make the necessary throw. When he threw the ball in rhythm, he did so with confidence, zip and accuracy. On the vertical ball to Jones, he was able to alter the placement to account for the closing safety.
He escaped the pocket twice, but both times were necessary. He wasn’t going one-read-and-done, and he didn’t have happy feet. He escaped only when the pocket broke down, and he kept his eyes upfield in both instances, looking for a place to throw.
On the 7 throws where he didn’t break contain, he averaged 2.2 seconds to throw.
There was a lot of good here, but this is where I pump the brakes a little.
Like I said, he ran limited concepts. Even within those 9 snaps, the Eagles started doing stuff to take those reads away. To his credit, Love was able to adjust and move to his other reads when that happened, but you can’t live that way for an entire game. I don’t think this approach was an indictment of Love’s progress within the playbook as much as it was driven by the circumstance itself (Love coming in during the 4th quarter on a week that wasn’t gameplanned for him to be in, facing a double-digit deficit).
I really want to see what Love looks like over the course of an entire game. Is he able to keep his composure for 4 quarters when you’re not able to lean on the same 4 concepts? How does he react when teams start taking away the things he wants to do over the course of a game? Can the accuracy be kept up for an entire game? For 2-3 games? Does that confidence and the ability to quickly progress through his reads erode as teams are able to key in on his tendencies?
There are a lot of questions left to be answered, for sure. But, for a 9 play sample in the 4th quarter? There was certainly a lot to like. I don’t know how many games Love will be starting this season, but I’ll be curious to see if he’s able to show this level of performance if/when he gets into another game this year.
👍