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Expectations are high for the Packers entering the 2024 season, a direct result of the team’s commitment to making sound, forward-facing decisions, especially in the draft. The Packers are as deep as any team in the NFL up and down the roster, a group packed with young talent. But let’s be clear: The upcoming season will still rest on the steps forward quarterback Jordan Love can take after his breakout year in 2023.
And Pro Football Focus is foreseeing something big coming from Love in the coming months. PFF predicted a 4,500-yard passing season from Love, with 5,000 yards being in sight, too.
That is significant because topping 4,500 yards would put Love ahead of Lynn Dickey for No. 2 on the Packers’ all-time single-season passing list — and challenging for 5,000 yards would move him past the 4,643 yards accumulated by Aaron Rodgers in 2011, for the most in franchise history.
Rodgers put together that mark during a 16-game season, and he played in only 15 of those games. He averaged an astounding 309.5 yards per game that year. In a 17-game season, Love would need to average 294.5 yards to pass 5,000 for the year, and 273.2 to break Rodgers’ team record.
Packers Will Have a Difficult Schedule in 2024
The notion that Love will make a run at a 5,000-yard season comes from PFF’s Trevor Sikkema in a September 2 article titled “Bold predictions for all 32 NFL teams in 2024.”
Here’s what Sikkema wrote:
“Making this ‘Jordan Love 5,000-yard passing season’ was tempting because that headline is slick,” Sikkema wrote. “But that is just so many passing yards, and the Packers may not need him to throw that much for as good as the team could be. Love has one of the most diverse groups of pass catchers in the league — maybe the most diverse. He took a few weeks in 2023 to grow his confidence, which we saw flourish late into the regular season and postseason.
“If he can hit the ground running to start 2024, he’ll eclipse 4,500 passing yards and perhaps even make a run at 5,000.”
Love and the Packers will get the chance to make that run starting on September 5 as the team travels to Brazil to play the Philadelphia Eagles, part of what ranks as one of the more difficult obstacles Love will face in pursuit of the team record for yardage this season: the schedule. The Packers are No. 22 on PFF’s strength of schedule rating, meaning only nine teams have more difficult schedules ahead.
Jordan Love Tallied 4,159 Yards Passing Last Year
One of the fears with Love, too, is that there is too much being expected of him too quickly, that he has been elevated to the league’s elite based on a relatively small body of evidence. Love threw for 4,159 yards and 32 touchdowns against 11 interceptions last season for a quarterback rating of 96.1. All very impressive for a first-year starter.
But Love had his ups and downs in the first nine games of last season, only really excelling in the final eight games, when he threw for 2,150 yards with 18 touchdowns and 1 interception. He was nearly perfect in the Packers’ playoff win over the Cowboys (157.2 rating) before stumbling in San Francisco in the conference semis.
That’s basically a nine-game sample size. Love could carry that momentum into 2024, no doubt, and plow toward 5,000 yards. But he’s still only in Year 2 and could yet have more bumps in the road ahead.
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