The only thing
Jordan Love struggled to do on Sunday was hold back a smile at his postgame press conference.
The often stoic 25-year-old quarterback is normally focused on the next task at hand but, on multiple occasions, he let a grin spread across his face. He couldn’t help it. And how can you blame him? If not for a garbage-time drop by tight end
Tucker Kraft, Love would’ve become the first quarterback ever with a perfect passer rating in his postseason debut.
Drafted into an awkward and unenviable situation when general manager Brian Gutekunst traded up in the first round to take him with four years remaining on Aaron Rodgers’ contract back in 2020, Love waited his turn for three seasons. He then faced the daunting task of following three decades of Hall of Fame quarterback play. Nobody knows how the rest of Love’s career will transpire, but those impossible expectations suddenly don’t seem so far-fetched after a dominant second half of the season and another astounding showing against the
Dallas Cowboys.
In his first playoff game, Love completed 16 of 21 passes for 272 yards and three touchdowns with a 157.2 passer rating as the No. 7 seed
Packers upset the No. 2 seed Cowboys 48-32, setting up a bout with the top-seeded
San Francisco 49ers in California on Saturday night. After a game like that, deep in enemy territory as a heavy underdog, it’s no wonder Love couldn’t hide the gratification of proving after all that waiting that he belonged on his biggest stage yet.
“I’m trying to hide some smiles,” Love said. “There’s a party in the locker room right now. It feels great. That’s really all I can say.”
“Man, Jordan Love, wow,” head coach Matt LaFleur said. “That’s about all I can say is, ‘wow.'”
The Packers didn’t just beat the Cowboys. They demolished them. The final score doesn’t indicate how much of a thumping this game was since Dallas scored 16 quick points late in the game when the Packers took their foot off the gas — LaFleur admitted fault for taking starters out.
It started at the coin toss when, much like they did in an upset of the
Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving, the Packers won the toss and elected to receive as road underdogs. Green Bay went 75 yards in 12 plays and took 7:52 off the clock, finishing the drive with a 3-yard touchdown run by running back
Aaron Jones. Love completed all four passes on the opening drive for 42 yards, while Jones carried seven times, first for no gain and a loss of three before gains of 3, 4, 15, 5 and 3 into the end zone. If anything, the run, or at least the threat of it, had been established to keep the Cowboys’ pass rush on its heels. According to Next Gen Stats, the Packers featured a run or play action on 10 of their first 12 plays.
“I think that was huge, even though the first two run plays, they kind of stopped them up,” Jones said of establishing the run. “But I’m glad we stuck with it.”
How many times have we heard LaFleur lament abandoning the run and not feeding Jones enough over the last five seasons? That’s why it was so important for the Packers to take an early lead, so they didn’t have the excuse of playing from behind for not doing so. The Packers never trailed, so Jones carried 21 times for 118 yards and three touchdowns. After the Packers didn’t have a 100-yard rusher over the season’s first 14 games, Jones has eclipsed 110 rushing yards in each of the last four games.
Jones played in 99 career games before Week 16 this season and only posted consecutive 100-yard rushing games once. His last four games? Twenty-one carries for 127 yards, 20 carries for 120 yards, 21 carries for 111 yards and 21 carries for 118 yards, with three touchdowns to boot against the Cowboys, bringing his career total at AT&T Stadium (three games) to 59 carries for 350 yards (5.9 yards per rush) and eight touchdowns on the ground.
Jones, who’s from El Paso, Texas, got into football because the Cowboys were his late father’s team. Jones grew up a Cowboys fan because he said, “You always want to be like your father.” Emmitt Smith was Jones’ favorite player. His first jersey was the Cowboys No. 22. Jones spoke with Smith before Sunday’s game and then put on a Smith-like performance while pops watched down on him.
“I know he was in there tonight,” Jones said of his father, who died in April 2021. “It was just a special place. Dallas is a special place to me, so it’s a full-circle moment. It feels like home.”
Jones wasn’t the only one who showed out in Sunday’s rout.
Love picked up where he left off after a second half of the regular season during which he might’ve been the
NFL’s best quarterback. On third-and-9 from his own 25-yard line late in the first quarter, Love scrambled to his right, stopped on a dime, shuffled back left and, with defensive end
Dorance Armstrong bearing down on him, hit a wide-open
Romeo Doubs over the middle for 26 yards. How about his 20-yard touchdown pass to rookie receiver
Dontayvion Wicks, on which Love threw a dime from 12 yards behind the line of scrimmage while leaning back on third-and-7 to give the Packers a 20-0 lead late in the second quarter?
For LaFleur, that play served as a microcosm of Love’s growth since his first career start, a 13-7 loss in Kansas City in Week 9 of the 2021 season. Love was thrust into the spotlight on short notice after Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 and the second-year quarterback stumbled as the
Chiefs relentlessly pressured him.
“To me, that was a big-time play,” LaFleur said. “It just shows the growth that he’s had from his first start vs. K.C. to now. Just so proud and happy for him. He’s a dude. He is a real dude.”
And for good measure, Love pulled one more trick out of his hat. LaFleur went for it on fourth-and-2 from the 3-yard line early in the fourth quarter, up 25 against his old boss in Atlanta, Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn. Love pulled the handoff to Jones, drifted back and to his right and fired a dart back across the middle off his right leg. The throw pierced defensive end
DeMarcus Lawrence and safety
Malik Hooker, finding the grasp of Doubs to all but seal the game by putting the Packers up, 47-16. Doubs, who entered Sunday with a single-game career-high of 95 receiving yards, caught six passes for 151 yards and that touchdown a week after missing most of the regular-season finale after coughing up blood.
Love’s throw was so good that at least one teammate didn’t even know how to react.
“I didn’t even celebrate because I was just standing there with my hands on my hips looking at
(Jon) Runyan (Jr.), like, I couldn’t believe the throw I had just seen,” third-year center
Josh Myers said. “I don’t know what it looked like from the TV, but it was one of the craziest throws I’ve ever seen in my life and I’ve seen a lot of crazy ones.”
“That sidearm throw, I said, ‘Damn. That was crazy,'” defensive tackle
Kenny Clark said. “That boy elite.”
The Cowboys led the NFL in pressure percentage during the season, according to TruMedia, pressuring opposing quarterbacks on 44.7 percent of pass-rush snaps. On Sunday, according to NGS, they pressured Love on only four of 21 dropbacks despite blitzing 10 times, a credit to Green Bay’s protection. After ranking seventh in sack rate this season, the Cowboys didn’t sack Love and only hit him three times. When pressured, Love went 4 of 4 for 114 yards and a touchdown.
Perhaps even more remarkable, according to NGS, the Packers held star pass rusher
Micah Parsons to one pressure on 19 rushes, the lowest single-game pressure rate of his career. Parsons’ lone pressure came when he was unblocked and right tackle
Zach Tom, a 2022 fourth-round pick, didn’t allow a pressure in nine matchups with Parsons.
“We knew that they’ve got a really good pass-rushing unit and we wanted to keep them away from that as much as possible, and we knew that they weren’t going to want to get involved in the run game and that was our game plan,” right guard Runyan said. “I think we ran the ball all over them, kind of at will. We stuck with the game plan and it lasted all four quarters.”
The standouts weren’t only on the offensive side of the ball, either. Cornerback
Jaire Alexander, who stepped on a foot during Wednesday’s walkthrough and twisted his ankle, said he underwent 5 to 6 hours of treatment every day leading up to the game and more at night. Then, deep in Cowboys territory late in the first quarter, receiver
Brandin Cooks ran an out route, pivoted and cut back toward the middle for Prescott’s throw that went past Cooks’ hands before somehow staying in Alexander’s after he read the route perfectly. Alexander missed eight games with injuries this season — it was almost a ninth on Sunday — but proved again why he’s the highest-paid cornerback in NFL history when the Packers turned his pick into seven points to take a 14-0 lead.
“It was lit,” Alexander said. “For real. It was lit, honestly. There was no better feeling. There’s a few quarterbacks who’ve thrown me multiple picks in my career and Dak is now one of them, so he’s among my top QBs.”
Later in the first half, safety
Darnell Savage, underwhelming for most of his five years in Green Bay since being a 2019 first-round pick, read wide receiver
CeeDee Lamb’s slant route to a tee and took Prescott’s pass 64 yards the other way to put the Packers up 26-0.
“I knew where 88 was. I knew he likes to go to 88,” Savage said. “I was just reading his eyes and ended up making a big play for the team. As far as the momentum swing, if you ask me, they were mad at me ’cause I wasn’t celebrating afterwards. I was like, ‘We gotta keep playing.’ But it was definitely a momentum swing in the game, I think. Anytime you score on defense is a big thing.”
There were unheralded plays, too, like tight end
Josiah Deguara’s chip block to eliminate Parsons from Jones’ third touchdown run. Cornerback
Keisean Nixon held a strong edge and didn’t fall for Prescott’s pass fake and sacked the quarterback on third-and-5 early in the second quarter to push the Cowboys out of go-for-it or field-goal range with the Packers leading, 14-0.
Rookie tight end
Luke Musgrave, too, should be recognized for not tripping. Let us explain.
Late in the third quarter, Musgrave leaked from the left edge of the formation up the right sideline. Uncovered, Musgrave hauled in a bomb at the 14-yard line from Love, who had faked a handoff to Jones and rolled left, before beating safety
Jayron Kearse in the end zone for a 40-16 lead. In Week 1, the Packers ran the same play and Love, after bobbling the snap, hit a wide-open Musgrave for what should’ve been a touchdown against the
Chicago Bears. But Musgrave tripped on the Soldier Field grass.
“I’m proud he was able to stay on his feet this time and score, unlike Chicago,” Love joked.
According to NGS, Musgrave had 17.2 yards of separation at the time of his catch, the sixth-most such yards on a touchdown pass since NGS originated in 2016.
“I think we were able to set them up pretty nice on Luke’s touchdown,” Jones said. “They’d been seeing a lot of outside zone all game and hit them with that.”
“We had a cool moment in the locker room,” LaFleur said of Musgrave, who was playing his second game since Week 11 after suffering a kidney laceration against the
Los Angeles Chargers. “Everybody celebrated the fact that he stayed up and he was so proud of himself that he put the ball in his outside arm and he finished through the goal line.”
As the Packers filtered off the field after a win that few but themselves seemed to have forecasted, some members of the team talked the talk.
Special teams coordinator Rich Bisaccia, the assistant head coach and special teams coordinator in Dallas from 2013-17, yelled, “How ’bout them Cowboys?!” Safety
Jonathan Owens exclaimed, “They thought s–t was sweet!” Nixon remarked about sending the Cowboys home. Rookie receiver
Jayden Reed suggested the Packers weren’t supposed to do what they had just done because of how young they are and Jones let out a guttural scream.
Then there was Love, stone-faced, walking through the tunnel like he had just finished another mundane day at work. No words for the cameras pointed at him, as a handful of others had. Just walking the walk, even if brief smiles crept in later. He high-fived longtime head equipment manager Red Batty before strolling into the locker room and onto the next task.
That task is arguably the league’s best team. The Packers will be underdogs again. But maybe more people should take Love’s approach and not act too surprised or elated. After all, perhaps what we saw Sunday from the Packers and their quarterback is an indication of what’s to come.
