Packers: What to Watch For in Jordan Love’s Preseason Debut

Little things

Often people who are watching football take the small things that a quarterback does for granted. But when you haven’t seen a young quarterback play in a professional game situation before, it bears paying attention to these seemingly insignificant details that are usually deemed automatic.

At Utah State, Love played almost exclusively out of the shotgun. In Matt LaFleur’s offense, he’ll be asked to take a considerable number of snaps from under center and perform play-action fakes before going through his progressions and ultimately making throws. He’s surely been practicing taking snaps from under center, but can Love show that he’s comfortable doing that in a game situation?

A large part of running the offense is keeping everything operating smoothly, like calling plays with enough time left on the play clock for the offense to get up to the line and set up shop. That combined with the use of different snap counts are things that Love will have to integrate into his game.

Can he keep the offense from incurring avoidable pre-snap penalties like delay of game and false starts? Does he have the timing down with using pre-snap motion and can he consistently transition from catching shotgun snaps to immediately making his reads and being ready to fire?

Many of these are basic things that a quarterback must be able to do easily, but because this is Jordan Love’s first real game action, I’ll be noting how well he can perform the elementary tasks of the quarterback position.