Aaron Rodgers talks about facing former team, the Green Bay Packers
This weekend the Pittsburgh Steelers host the Green Bay Packers, marking the first time Aaron Rodgers will face his former team.
- The article compares Green Bay Packers quarterback Jordan Love to his predecessor, Aaron Rodgers, at a similar point in their careers.
- Six games into his third season as a starter in 2010, Rodgers and the Packers had a 3-3 record, raising questions about their Super Bowl potential.
- In contrast, Love has led the Packers to a 4-1-1 start and holds better statistics than Rodgers did at the same career stage.
- Despite a slow start, Rodgers went on to win the Super Bowl in the 2010 season, showcasing that a quarterback’s trajectory can change rapidly.
GREEN BAY – Aaron Rodgers’ prospects looked good at the start of the 2010 season.
Las Vegas oddsmakers had his Green Bay Packers at 10-to-1 odds to win the Super Bowl, behind only Dallas and New Orleans in the NFC.
A good number of national TV pundits picked the Packers to win or at least get to the Super Bowl, including Bill Cowher, Dan Marino, Chris Mortensen, Adam Schefter and Peter King. Cowher even went out on a limb and predicted Rodgers would blossom into the best quarterback in the NFC.
“This is the year you are going say, ‘He’s as good as Drew Brees, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning,’” Cowher said on CBS the day of the regular-season opener.
Yet, six games into the 2010 season, the Packers were muddling along at 3-3 and coming off back-to-back overtime losses at Washington (16-13) and at home to Miami (23-20). In both those defeats, Rodgers had the ball in overtime with a chance to win the game with only a field goal but failed.
“Know what the Green Bay Packers have?” asked Bob McGinn in the lede of his game story for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after the Miami defeat. “A head coach and a quarterback who can’t win close games.
“Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers etched another disturbing chapter in their lose-at-the-end football résumés Sunday, managing new ways to come up short for the second week in a row and in overtime, no less.”
As you surely know, those Packers survived several ups and downs, squeaked into the playoffs as the last seed, and went on a magical run to win the Super Bowl. By the time he hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in Dallas, Rodgers was one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL.
Fifteen years later, he’s with the Pittsburgh Steelers and about to face Jordan Love, his successor in Green Bay. Like Rodgers at this time in 2010, Love is six games into his third season as a starter and sixth season in the league.
So how do they compare?
Comparing Jordan Love, Aaron Rodgers in their third seasons
To begin with, the expectations for both going into the season, personally and for their teams, were high. But they were a little higher for Rodgers in 2010.
Rodgers had led the league in passer rating in ‘09, the Packers had finished the season 11-5, and he’d put up 45 points, albeit against the No. 27 defense that season, in an overtime loss at Arizona in the wild-card round of the playoffs.
But that 3-3 start cast doubt. Rodgers was holding onto the ball too long (nine sacks combined in the Washington and Miami losses) and ranked No. 14 in passer rating at the time.
“Part of it seems to be in the wake of the Brett Favre era, Mike McCarthy and Rodgers are so wary of throwing interceptions they don’t take chances,” wrote Cliff Christl and Eric Baranczyk on PackersNews.com after the Miami loss. “And if you don’t take chances, you don’t make plays. Brett Favre threw away plenty of close games, but he won more than his share by making daring throws.”
And the first sentence of the PackersNews game story by yours truly from the defeat to Miami: “Where is the offensive juggernaut that was supposed to be the 2010 Green Bay Packers?”
Compare that with Love this year.
Barely a week after trading for Micah Parsons, the Packers had the NFL’s sixth-best odds for winning the Super Bowl at 13-to-1. After Love’s struggles with knee and groin injuries last yer, and the Packers’ offensive meltdown at the end of last season, nobody was predicting him to be a premier quarterback this year. But expectations were still high for him to look more like the player he was in late 2023 than last year.
Going into this season one defensive coach in Mike Sando’s annual preseason rankings of NFL quarterbacks described Love as an intriguing player: “When we played them, I was like, ‘Man, this ball is going downfield — he don’t give a s—.’ You don’t see a lot of quarterbacks play like that these days. It’s almost like they build it into their offense and see the benefits of making you defend the whole field and hitting a couple in exchange for a pick or two. It was interesting playing him. I came away thinking there is something different about this kid.”
So where does Love sit after six games compared to Rodgers at this same point in ‘10?
The Packers are 4-1-1. He ranks No. 6 in the NFL in passer rating at 108.1 (Rodgers was No. 14 at 89.7). Love has 10 touchdown passes and two interceptions to Rodgers’ 10 and 7 in 2010. In several meaningful ways, Love is playing better so far.
Love hasn’t had a dominating game yet in 2025, but he’s had clutch moments.
That includes answering with scores that either tied or gave the Packers the lead on their four possessions in the fourth quarter and overtime of their tie with Dallas. He also led the Packers to a field goal late in the fourth quarter that gave them a two-score lead to put away their win over Cincinnati. And last week he led the game-winning touchdown drive, including converting a fourth-and-2 pass, in the final five minutes of a win at Arizona.
But Love also had the game-costing interception late in the fourth quarter in the Packers’ loss at Cleveland, and in the Dallas tie his clock mismanagement in the final 30 seconds cost the Packers a decent shot at the winning touchdown and barely left time to kick the tying field goal.
By comparison, in his 3-3 start in ‘10, Rodgers was sharp (116.3 rating) while putting up 34 points in a 34-7 Week 2 blowout of Buffalo and had the Packers in position to beat Washington in regulation before Mason Crosby doinked a 53-yard field goal off the upright.
On the flip side, Rodgers also went scoreless in his six possessions in the fourth quarter and overtime against Washington, which came into that game ranked No. 31 in yards allowed, and he threw an interception in overtime that set up the winning field goal. He also had a possession in overtime against Miami needing only a field goal to win but went three-and-out.
When I think back to this point in 2010, I don’t remember anybody still predicting the Packers would win the Super Bowl. As for Rodgers, I saw a quarterback the Packers could win a lot of games with, and a Super Bowl with strong talent around him. But a future MVP? No way.
If you’re familiar with Sando’s annual rankings of quarterbacks, where about 50 NFL front-office executives and coaches put each of the league’s starting quarterbacks in one of five tiers, Rodgers would in my mind have been low Tier 2 at this point in 2010, and maybe an upper-Tier 2 in the making.
According to the rankings: “A Tier 2 quarterback can carry his team sometimes but not as consistently. He can handle pure-passing situations in doses and/or possesses other dimensions that are special enough to elevate him above Tier 3. He has a hole or two in his game.”
As impressive as Rodgers was in the overtime loss at Arizona in the ‘09 season’s playoffs, I thought that day showed a good quarterback playing an excellent game against a bad defense (No. 27 in the league in points allowed). And it was hard to forget that his strip-sack fumble returned for a touchdown provided the game-winning score in that game.
I surely didn’t see a guy who could carry a team weekly, which is the definition of Tier 1 in Sando’s rankings, and become a future Pro Football Hall of Famer.
For me, at least, it wasn’t until his near-perfect performance in the Packers’ blowout of Atlanta in the divisional round of the playoffs in ‘10 that it became clear how good Rodgers really was.
Jordan Love is looking to find the next level of his game in Year 3
In Sando’s rankings going into this season, Love was at the bottom of the second tier, the No. 13 quarterback overall. (Rodgers, by the way, dropped from Tier 1 going into ‘24 to the top of Tier 3 entering this season). Love hasn’t done anything to drop below that, though nothing yet to rank more than a spot or two higher either.
As one high-ranking NFL scout put it this week: “I think he’s a very talented quarterback. But I’m looking for him to take them to a different level.”
The truth is, there’s not a lot to separate Love and Rodgers at this point in their careers. Rodgers ended up exploding later in 2010, but don’t count me among those who saw it coming. Be skeptical of those who say they did.
As most reading this will know, Rodgers won the Super Bowl in his sixth season in the NFL and at age 27, as did Brett Favre; Love is in his sixth season and turns 27 on Nov. 2.
I don’t claim to know the future more than anyone else, so I don’t know what’s in store for Love the rest of this season. He has a lot of talent around him, as did Rodgers in ‘10. Rodgers had the superior receiving corps (Greg Jennings, James Jones, an ascending Jordy Nelson and a declining Donald Driver), Love has the much better running back (Josh Jacobs).
But despite that sixth-year Super Bowl coincidence with Rodgers and Favre, quarterbacks don’t all develop at the same rate. And after the way Rodgers took off, it’s hard to be confident predicting Love’s trajectory. He’s shown enough to think he can be a top 8 or so quarterback, but the proof will have to come on the field this year.
That’s a big part of what the rest of the Packers’ season is about, just as it was at this time in 2010: How much better will their quarterback get in the next three months? We know how it turned with Rodgers. Fifteen years later he’ll be Love’s biggest test yet of the young 2025 season.
