Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre: two Packers all-time greats. Both great at playing football, but one clearly beats the other in a different department.
Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre are just as similar as you might think. The Green Bay Packers legends each spent 15-plus seasons in Wisconsin, threw for roughly 60,000 passing yards and 400-plus touchdowns, won league MVP at least three times, and… are we forgetting anything? Oh yeah, they each joined the New York Jets immediately after their Green Bay stints.
For the Packers, life sans Rodgers isn't as scary as it used to be, and that's largely because Rodgers helped mentor Jordan Love for the last few years.
Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst shared some thoughts with Peter King about the team's quarterback room heading into 2023 and gave Rodgers due credit:
"We've always believed that we like to develop quarterbacks. Part of developing quarterbacks is they gotta sit for a while, I think, and then they gotta play. Obviously, Jordan Love sat and Aaron [Rodgers] did a great job just kinda mentoring him. But now Jordan's ready to play. He needs to play."
Love only played in a handful of games in 2022, yet his development clearly impressed coaches and signaled that he was ready to be a full-time starter. Simply put, Green Bay wouldn't be willing to let go of Rodgers this offseason were they not high on Love.
Despite not picking up his fifth-year option, the franchise appears to be feeling good about the 2020 first-rounder and recently locked him down in a team-friendly two-year deal to see what he can accomplish.
Packers thank Aaron Rodgers for being a mentor to Jordan Love
Would Love have gotten this far without Rodgers' help? Maybe, but the veteran quarterback lending a hand in Love's development was just a nice, if not a little surprising, gesture of good will.
Rodgers has historically developed strong relationships with his backups from Matt Flynn to Tim Boyle to Scott Tolzien, and after the Packers drafted Love, he said that he expected to have "the same relationship" with the young rookie.
Rodgers said of Love in May of 2020:
"We had a great conversation the day after the draft and I'm excited to work with him. He seems like a really good kid with a good head on his shoulders."
Compare that to Favre's matter-of-fact comment: "My contract doesn't say I have to get Aaron Rodgers ready to play". It's like night and day.
Favre infamously looked down on his mentoring duties and couldn't have cared less about tossing rookie quarterbacks straight into the lion's den. Rodgers, however, made sure Love saw him as a resource and a competitor.
In 2023, the Packers' young core gets its training wheels taken away and will naturally wobble, but Rodgers' last gift to the franchise was putting Love on the right track even though Favre couldn't bother to make that effort with him all those years ago. That's where you draw the line between a great quarterback, and an even better one.