The Packers QB Cycle
It’ll be extremely irritating if the Packers have genuinely pulled this shit off for the third QB in a row. But if they do, we already have the entire blueprint for Jordan Love’s career laid out in front of us.
Farve was a flawed prospect who fell to the second round. He got traded to the Packers for cheap, started shortly afterward due to injuries, and the rest is history. He won a Super Bowl within 5 years of starting. He then spent the next decade not quite making it. They lost the next Super Bowl to the Broncos, and then the teams would struggle and Farve would throw dumb interceptions and every year would feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. The Packers would either struggle against a clearly superior playoff opponent like the 2002 Rams, choke against a team they should have beaten like the 2004 Vikings, or just not make the playoffs at all. Sure enough, by the mid-late 2000’s Brett Favre had started his retirement dance. He has a final resurgence in 2007 only for the team to once again choke it all away to the Giants, and retire.
Well, sorta. We remember what happened next. It was a football meme for a decade after he pulled the wishy-washy retirement stunt and even now people still invoke his name when athletes flirt with retirement over and over again.
Favre went to the Jets, sent his dick pic to a reporter, got hurt, went to the Vikings and choked away the championship game on a classic Favre Int, then got bludgeoned enough to finally walk away for good the next season. Brett Favre getting his ass beat would end up feeling a lot more cathartic years later when it became clear what an asshole he was. Green Bay did their best with him and got rid of him right as he became too toxic.
And then the same fucking thing happened again. Rodgers was a flawed prospect who fell late into the first round, got shoved on the bench, started and quickly looked like a franchise guy. Won a Super Bowl within 5 years of starting, and then spent the next decade not quite making it. It was almost a juiced-up version of the Favre years. Rodgers put up better numbers and better play, and crashed even harder when it mattered. The 15-1 team would embarrass themselves against the same Giants in Lambeau, the collapse against the Seahawks, the repeated ass beatings from San Francisco. Rodgers would also start his own annoying retirement dance towards the end of his tenure. He would become a deeply annoying personality as more of his personal beliefs came to light and eventually the team broke down and shipped him off. Again, to the Jets.
Rodgers will presumably play this year and my guess is that to follow the formula he will play well and then choke in the playoffs again, and then he’ll be done and go off and do a podcast I will never listen to. Then he will have a horrible scandal outside of football that makes us hate him even more. My guess is shady crypto stuff, like a huge pump N dump or something.
So what does this mean for Jordan Love? Well, he was a flawed prospect who fell late into the first round (arguably “fell” is the wrong word, overdrafted might be a better way to see it), he spent years on the bench just like Rodgers, and as of last year appears (still to be determined long-term) to have transitioned to being the guy. So. The Packers will unfortunately win a Super Bowl with Love in the next 5 years. I don’t know who they beat, but they’ll get another one. Then for the decade after that win, they will be consistent playoff contenders who stumble and fall over and over again. Love will flirt with retirement, the new coach the Packers brought in a few years before will get frustrated with him, draft a replacement in the late first, Love will have a resurgence in play to spite the replacement, then another playoff choke will bring it down and he will become Jordan Love, New York Jet.
I’m mostly curious what sort of dipshit he turns into. Favre ended up being a sex pest and then a financial criminal, Rodgers is going the conspiracy wacko grifter route. What does that leave Jordan? Maybe he’s the big gambler. We find out he was putting bets on everything, including his own games. The Packers will be well on their way to the next Lombardi with franchise QB 4 by then.
Honestly, the Packers SB coaches (Holmgren and Mccarthy) went through a somewhat similar cycle too.
1) they came from a successful coaching tree (Walsh and Marty)
2) helped mold their young quarterback into legendary status
3) spent the rest of their post-packer old man phase careers in playoff mediocrity (ie. the Hasselbeck Seahawks & the Dak Cowboys)
I think we should call them the Shaun Alexander Seahawks. Honestly they had some decent squads and may have won the SB if it weren’t for some shit calls.
Jordan & gambling. Never gets old
I’m not directing this at you, Dave, but more towards the utterly annoying Tom Grossis of the world. Seriously. PEOPLE. How many times do we have to go over this??? YOU DO NOT JUDGE A QUARTERBACK BASED ON THEIR FIRST FULL SEASON AS A STARTER. You. Do. NOT.
I don’t care if this guy had the single greatest QB season in the history of the game. Teams have an offseason to look at the footage, see what he does well, and gameplan how to dismantle him. He needs to succeed AGAIN before we can even joke about him being another King Jackass in a long line of King Jackasses.
I fenced in college, so allow me to use it as an analogy. You can have the best lunge thrust in the world, people will learn how to predict it and start parrying you. And if that’s the only move you’ve got, you’re done. You need to start layering on new techniques, new ways of working, and start getting into feints and ripostes. If you can’t fake the fake and then counter fake to fake the parry fake circle around and fake double fake fake THRUST on the regular, you will be an utter failure.
In closing, screw Tom Grossi and f@#% you, Favre/Rodgers, lol.
I mean, Mariano Rivera rode one pitch to the hof so clearly that analogy isn’t universal among all sports
What kind of a miserable asshole hates Tom Grossi?
Well, for one thing, I didn’t say I hate him. I said he’s utterly annoying. I subscribed to his channel for awhile, and I just find his charity work to be almost entirely rooted in self-aggrandizement. Is it nice that he’s raising money for charity? Absolutely, but I find it exceptionally irksome that the very foundation is: “Look at how great I am, doing this charity work!”
But when it comes to the Packers themselves? Holy gods. When they suck he’s fine, but when they get one win, even against an awful team, he becomes this chest-thumping dillhole strutting around like they just went 17-0. If finding all of that annoying makes me an a-hole… then yeah, well you know, that’s just like your opinion, man.
Whenever I see someone saying someone only does charitable work for their own self aggrandizement, what I see is the unspoken followup to that sentence, “because that’s the only reason I would do it.” Of course you hate watching someone celebrate their team winning, there’s nothing miserable people like you hate more than someone else not being miserable.
Celebrating his team winning does not require him screaming that the Bears fans are crapping their pants for the next 20 years because the Packers just did it again, over and over multiple times at the top of his voice for like 5 minutes. That’s called rubbing shit in someone else’s face, and he does this frequently.
Do you apply this concept to everything people say? Because you can attach “that’s the only reason I would do it” to literally anything you want to, and it would be just as (in)accurate.
I’m sorry that your worldview is so narrow that finding a popular YouTuber to be annoying mandates that I must be a miserable a-hole. Despite what you and several others here want to think, it’s quite possible to complain about something and still be a relatively happy person. I can complain about anything anywhere at any time, just ask my wife and children!
well, I cheer for the Purple Incarnation of Satan….so I think it’s just a respectful occupational hazard for me, lol
In response to your comment and olympics coming up, fencing is the most depressingly boring sport in the world. It sounds like it would be so cool, but every time someone gets hit after like 2 seconds.
Yes. Yes, it is. Foil is the worst, because the sword curve allows it to bend. So you can flick it and get the tip to curve over someone’s shoulder and touch their back, and you still get a point for it. Some of the best foilists are so fast you can’t even see it happen.
Jesus Christ, you must have a really shitty life to feel the need to vomit that out into a text box.
Why do people always assume you need to be miserable to have pet peeves? It’s usually the opposite. Someone who is very satisfied and happy with their life is far more likely to have the time and security to lean into their sport fandom quirks. If my basement was flooding and I had to change the gauze on the bloody stump where my leg used to be, I probably wouldn’t be ranting on a sports webcomic site. I’m glad you cared enough to reply, though. :warm hugs:
Uh, wonder what la-la land are you in, but it is much likelier to be the actual opposite. Miserable, passive-aggressive comments = miserable, passive-aggressive people. The person with a flooding basement and a festering wound is much more likelier to complain online because he’s/she’s angry and wants to let it all out.
All of that was to say your comments sound way more like you’re coping than actually happy. No happy person would get so angry at online randos like they shot your dog.
Awwwwww, yea! I’ve got all the psychologists out here telling me how miserable I am. Keep it up and pretty soon I’m gonna start believing you guys!
Is it specifically because I called Grossi annoying that’s bringing you guys out of the woodwork, or because you think I’m foaming at the mouth over one-hit-wonders at QB? I make comments with this level of deranged lunacy on this website all the friggin time, and I’ve NEVER seen the level of vengeful vitriol as I’m getting on this post, lololol.
I’ve made fun of Dave multiple times. I’ve gone on rants about Tom Brady being a whiny li’l shit, I’ve made fun of the Iggles, the WTFers, I’ve gone on epic 9-paragraph long rants about OBJ… and I have never had this many completely out-of-the-blue randos bitterly throwing pejoratives at me like it’s candy.
What a wild time to be alive. Sorry for derailing your comic, Dave. LOLOLOL.
Because this comic had nothing to do with Grossi and you made it about him for… reasons?
Change the bandage on your stump.
– This comic is about the Packers, and whether they may have found a third franchise QB.
– Tom Grossi is a Packers fan.
– Though t’was only alluded to in my original comment, but he would frequently go on loud tirades proclaiming Jordan Love to be the next coming, even after beating lowly teams, such as the Bears (Sorry Bears fans).
Treading on a limb here with more verbal diarrhea… but I think those dots connect.
Thank you for the reminder. The stump appears to be weeping a little, I think I’m seeing pus. It’s gross, whatever it is. Maybe sitting in waist-deep brackish water isn’t such a good thing for it? :cracks knuckles: Well, I guess this is an excellent time to visit some Packers forums and spew all over them.
Grossi fanboys are so weird. Perna attaching himself to that guy and undergoing the descent into terrible REACTION content was the reason I stopped watching thatsgoodsports.
I definitely feel like I hit a nerve calling him annoying, lol. I agree, seeing Perna lean into that has kinda turned me off. First I dropped Click Bait Sports, then I dropped Grossi, then I dropped GPS, I haven’t unsubscribed to thatsgoodsports yet, mostly because Perna himself is still hilarious to me.
Oh it’s so true. I mean let’s even look at Jalen Hurts! Dude has an incredible year in an incredible team, and then last year the wheels kind of start to come off. It’s hard to be too pejorative about a 11-6 record, but his Passer Rating dropped nearly 10 points from the year before while his stats remained mostly-unchanged. I’m not saying he’s a bad QB, but the league definitely gets a chance to punch back. Between injuries to a QB or his team, moving coordinators, tactical improvement we’ve seen a lot of good young QBs regress after one good season.
Now here’s a guy who gets it! Jalen Hurts is an excellent example of calling it too soon. I’ll agree the record still looked good, but the way in which the Iggles crumpled as the year went on would trouble me, were I a Philly fan. He might bounce back and look great in year 3, but he may also prove to be little more than a flash in the pan like Carson Wentz was.
Even someone like Patrick Mahomes, after his first Super Bowl win, it was immediately, “CAN HE GET MORE SUPER BOWLS THAN BRADY?” Like, dude, he just won his FIRST, and you’re already writing him in for over half a dozen more?? I wish we could go back to taking things one season at a time.
One of my favorite stats relates to this.
Of the nearly 40 QBs who have lost their debut super bowl….only 7 have made it back to play in another. Of that 7, only 3 have ever won. Those three being Len Dawson, Bob Griese, and John Elway.
I think that stat is really really interesting and kind of flies in the face of how much we want to pump up the latest QB wunderkind, a lot can go wrong. It doesn’t mean they can’t still be effective QBs, but we’re comparing Jordan Love to Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers. 2 absolute dickwads, but also 2 of the best QBs to ever play. Let’s hold on before we start crowning Jordan Love just because he plays in the armpit of America.
L + ratio + didn’t ask + skill issue + cope + seethe + touch grass + donate to St Jude
Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?
Fortunately (for us Packer fans), most of Love’s success last year came when he finally started to hit on the deep throws and extended plays, to complement the short game. So, very good odds he’ll be the real deal and not a… lunge-thruster.
That said, I agree, the number of Packer fans who want to crown him after half a season of success is absurd.
Green Bay has a great system in place where they can draft their future QB and have them be the understudy. It relieves a lot of pressure off them to perform immediately and it helps to walk onto an 9-8 team rather than a 2-15 one. Reverse Bryce Young and Jordan Love and their situationd could be very different.
If that pattern continues, maybe the Giants will beat Jordan Love Packers in next few years after he wins a SB and goes on to become the first team with sub .500 record to win the title.
Would that Super Bowl win be against the Mayo/Maye Patriots 3 Super Bowl wins into their newest Dynasty?
Now that would be neat.
I’m shocked the Vikings don’t have a bed of dead QBs in the last panel as well.
They’ve at least been able to build up a great-decent collection of QBs in their history: Tarkenton, Culpepper, Cousins, Cunningham, Moon (I know, not homegrown, but still better than the friggin Bears).
When the three best QBs in your franchise history are Jay Cutler, Sid Luckman and Jim McMahon, you’ve got problems.