Brett Favre. Aaron Rodgers. Jordan Love.

The Green Bay Packers have been set at the quarterback position essentially since 1992, with those three men having been excellent stewards of the organization.

Quarterback is the most important position in professional sports, so having a great quarterback is the single greatest trump card that any team can possess.

The Packers have essentially had great quarterback play with a few exceptions in every NFL season since 1992. That’s a big reason why they’ve been competitive for as long as they have been, with their 348 regular-season wins being only one less than New England’s 349 during that span.

Love appears to be the latest in that lineage. There is a long way to go before Love matches either of his predecessors. Those two will both be first ballot Hall of Famers. They have seven MVPs, two Super Bowl titles, and three Super Bowl appearances between them.

Favre’s number is retired and Rodgers’ number will be some day, as well.

Favre and Rodgers, however, provide a cautionary tale that appears to be rearing its ugly head in Green Bay this season.

Jordan Love Must Be Superman

Love has been excellent for most of the season. The Packers have relied on him more than they ever have since he took the reins in 2023.

Love does not have the gaudiest numbers this season, but he is playing incredibly well as he’s helped guide the Packers to a 5-3 record. He’s done so with no help from his running game, an offensive line constantly in flux and pass catchers who lead the league in drops.

As a result, Love has had to play the role of Superman to ensure the Packers are competitive, let alone win.

“Can’t say enough great things about him because he’s carrying the burden of everything right now, just dealing the ball and throwing a lot of great passes,” coach Matt LaFleur said after Thursday’s victory over the Panthers.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If you’ve followed the Packers for any period of time since Favre took over at quarterback, you’ve probably understood that every weekend the team had a chance to win because of who was under center. The concerns you had likely were related to the supporting cast – or lack thereof.

After going to back-to-back Super Bowls in 1996 and 1997, Favre saw the roster around him start to decay. That started at head coach, with Mike Holmgren replaced by Ray Rhodes and Mike Sherman. Neither coach was a savant like Holmgren.

The lack of passing-game weapons surrounding Favre by the end of his tenure, shoddy defenses and inconsistent run games helped prevent the Packers from reaching another Super Bowl. Favre was often asked to play Superman, and inevitably proved to be human.

Rodgers suffered a similar fate when he was the quarterback in Green Bay. His team won the Super Bowl in 2010 before Rodgers won the first of his four MVP awards.

From 2010 onward, however, the Packers never really had a full team surrounding him. He had to carry bad defenses, mediocre run games and catastrophic special teams to the postseason before they inevitably would run into better teams that could exploit those weaknesses.

Like Favre, Rodgers would prove to be human in the postseason, and the team around him was rarely able to save them from defeat if he did not play his best.

Jordan Love Must Carry the Offense

Through eight games this season, Love is working through that same fate. Offensively, everything falls on Love’s shoulders. Love is third in the NFL in passing yards per game and the running game is the worst in the league. So, you get this from NFL analyst Dan Orlovsky.

Jordan Love has accounted for 82% of Green Bay's yardage this season.

— Dan Orlovsky (@danorlovsky7) October 30, 2026

To be clear, Green Bay’s special teams is not very good, but at least its defense has been good to start the season.

Offensively, however, Love has been asked to carry a significant burden.

Their run game is threatening to compete for the least productive ground game in the modern era. Their offensive line has gotten him obliterated for most of the first eight games. Some of those issues have corrected themselves, but Love has spent most of the season under duress.

The best example of the Packers’ season, and how it could end, came on Thursday night against Carolina.

Love started the game on an absolute heater. He completed 17 of his first 20 passes. The three incompletions? Two drops and one catchable pass. Love’s excellence in the first half and early third quarter helped the Packers build a 27-10 lead.

In a normal setting, that should have been enough. Green Bay’s defense is excellent. A passable run game could help turn the Packers into a boa constrictor and squeeze the life out of the game.

Green Bay’s offense is not normal. Their run game was unreliable, Love cooled off and the Panthers got closer than they ever had any business being.

Packers Struggle to Finish

Can Green Bay survive with a putrid run game? Even Love doesn’t think so.

“Definitely. I think that’s an area we’ve got to keep getting better at, keep finding what’s working, but we’ve got to improve because, especially late in the game, you’ve got to be able to lean on that,” Love said after the game. 

“We did some really good things and I think, obviously, late in the game, it wasn’t good enough. We weren’t able to finish the way we wanted so that’s something we’ve got to improve on, clean up as an offense and be better there.”

Love is capable of putting on Superman’s cape. He’s done so in Green Bay before. He’s had to do so throughout the season.

Whether it’s Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Favre, Rodgers or Love, the best quarterbacks eventually play below their standard.

Asking one man to carry the weight of an entire organization on his shoulders is too much to ask for anyone.

Ask both of the quarterbacks who were great that came before Love. They both should have more than one Super Bowl based on their talent level alone. Ultimately, a lot of factors play into why the Packers’ trophy case is not fully stocked the way that having back-to-back Hall of Fame quarterbacks would indicate it should be.

Moving from Rodgers to Love was supposed to come with the understanding that their quarterback was not going to have to play that role every week.

If the Packers want to win a championship this year, or in the near future, they better figure out a way to win when Jordan Love plays like Clark Kent.

At the unofficial midpoint of the season, @JacobWestendorf has his list of risers and fallers for the Packers. ⬇️https://t.co/zFbeojdz2n

— Bill Huber (@BillHuberNFL) October 31, 2026