Times Are A-Changin’, And They Will Challenge Packers in NFC North

Jordan Love is the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. The contract extension he received in August ensured the Packers would have quarterback stability for the next half-decade.

After Love and the offense took the league by storm to close his first season as a starter, fans and team personnel began to dream.

Did the Packers really strike gold with a third consecutive great quarterback?

That remains to be seen. Love played injured in 2024, and the offense as a whole took a step back.

Whether or not Love is elite is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that he’s a good starting quarterback in the NFL. Those are worth their weight in gold.

That’s been the case in Green Bay since 1992, when Brett Favre first stepped onto the field as a member of the Packers, taking over for Don Majkowski on a franchise-shifting September day at Lambeau Field.

Favre took off from there, winning three MVP awards and a Super Bowl before handing the reins to Aaron Rodgers in 2008. Rodgers won four MVP awards and a Super Bowl before handing the keys to Love in 2023.

Love has shown flashes of MVP potential and won a playoff game in his first season as a starter. He believes the Packers have what it takes to get to the Super Bowl.

The rest of the NFC North? That’s been a walking definition of quarterback purgatory.

For years, the division was mostly occupied by whoever was under center for the Packers and the equivalent of the Three Blind Mice.

Chicago, famous for being a quarterback wasteland, was best served when Jay Cutler was the signal-caller. Cutler was solid but made too many mistakes. In a foreshadowing of things to come, in his first game as the Bears’ quarterback in 2009, he threw four interceptions, including one to Al Harris that sealed a victory for Green Bay on opening night.

Since Favre took over in Green Bay in 1992, Chicago traded two first-round picks to acquire Cutler and spent first-round picks on Cade McNown, Rex Grossman, Mitchell Trubisky and Caleb Williams. Of the quarterbacks Chicago drafted, only Grossman got a second contract, which was a one-year deal to compete for the starting job with Kyle Orton.

Trubisky is best known for being picked ahead of Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes. McNown never amounted to anything. The jury remains out on Williams, last year’s No. 1 overall pick.

Detroit, like Chicago, struggled. Before Matthew Stafford, it put up one losing season after another with the likes of Joey Barrington and Charlie Batch. Even when it had Stafford, it could only muster two winning seasons. As soon as Stafford left Detroit, he won a Super Bowl with the Los Angeles Rams and has made a run in the postseason each of the two years he was healthy.