The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021: XI
Packers at Chiefs, Week 9: Love Lost
It started bad, it continued to be bad, and it ended bad for Jordan Love in his regular season Packers debut. It was inauspicious enough that his first start for the Pack had to come because of Aaron Rodgers’ dumbfounding “immunization” fiasco, but to have to play against Patrick Mahomes, the Platonic Ideal of quarterbacks who all young quarterbacks will be compared to and judged against, while also having to more or less extemporaneously prove that he was worth a first round pick the year before? Love can be excused for being nervous in this challenging spot, but he cannot be excused for teaming up with Mahomes to produce one of the most tortuous, distended, and ponderously uninteresting games ever played by either of these teams.
This poor guy Jordan Love. The comparisons between his entry into the NFL and Aaron Rodgers’ 2005 draft day odyssey and the ensuing awkwardness at GB headquarters with Brett Fravre have been done to death, so we won’t belabor that analysis. What we will belabor is the morass of mistake-ridden play that ensued after Kansas City’s first and Green Bay’s second drive – i.e., after the scripted plays ran out.
Awesome though the Andy Reid Chiefs are, they are expert at this sort of thing: looking like offensive dynamos for 15 or so plays and then going into protracted competitive hibernation. We’ve seen it so often from the Chiefs that we probably do not ascribe as much penalty to these instances as we should. Think back to two different 21-3 leads the Reid Chiefs built on hallowed Chiefs Kingdom home turf before squandering their leads to palpably overmatched opponents, both in the playoffs: the 2017 Wild Card versus the Tennessee Titans and the 2021 AFC Championship versus the Bengals. In both instances, the Chiefs scored three fast touchdowns before halftime before losing their way entirely in the second half and, thanks to equal parts offensive befuddlement and defensive chicanery, losing to inferior adversaries. The same happened here, but the fall was expedited, occurring after the Chiefs’ very. first. drive. Ew. But they still won.
Following a marathon 8-minute 16-play march featuring 4 3rd or 4th down conversions, Mahomes found Kelce in the endzone on a nicely-faked play action pop pass. From there…well, the final score was 13-7, so you can imagine how such a game might unfold when one of the 2 touchdowns scored occurred on the second drive in the first quarter. The Packers, near fatally crippled by an under-prepared quarterback visibly struggling to synchronize timing with his targets, did not score on offense until it was far too late, only reaching the endzone with 5:05 left in the fourth quarter. At one point, they went 17 straight plays without reaching Kansas City territory, and when they finally did, they somehow lasted 9 plays before a Jordan Love pass was seized out of the air by L’Jarius Sneed, effectively terminating a 16-play, 68-yard drive with nary a point being added to the GB section of the scoreboard.
But there was gruesomeness glowering on the opposite side of the scoreboard as well. For as unwatchable and disjointed as the Green Bay offense was on this day, Kansas City was hardly much better. Perhaps the game plan was scaled back towards a more ball-control-oriented strategy to shorten the game while an inexperienced and ineffective quarterback was manning the enemy’s backfield, you may be thinking. But this was manifestly not the case, as Patrick Mahomes threw 37 passes on this day (and was sacked once), finishing just a pass and change short of his 38.7 attempts per game average for 2021. These cumulatively accounted for 166 yards at the meager average of 4.48 yards per attempt. Derisory as those numbers are, the Chiefs’ running game may have been even more horrible, with their team total of 25 attempts netting 77 yards, barely 3 yards per attempt. 25 attempts isn’t that much, so could they have pressed the issue and wrung a few more hard-fought yards out of their ground game on this day? Maybe, maybe not. When you’re just eclipsing 3 yards a clip, it’s hard to blame them for throwing the ball as much as they did. It seems fair to assign even blame to both components of the KC offense on a day when the air-ground partnership equated to 237 total, unenlightened yards, a patently un-Mahomesian sum. Still there’s only one way to win a football game, and that’s by outscoring your opponent. In this effort, the Chiefs succeeded; they will not win any style points for this, though (and they won’t win their bettors any money, either – their failure to stop the lifeless Green Bay offense from producing a late Allen “Lazarus” Lazard resurrection touchdown meant Kansas City failed to cover their lofty -7.5 spread. No one went home happy this day.).
The poor offensive play and shocking lack of scoring from both teams cannot be fully ascribed to offensive inefficiency on this day, however. This was one of those games upon whose countenance the Football Gods saw fit to mark with the sigil of special teams tomfoolery. Contributing to this game’s discomforting length were numerous, lengthy procedural deliberations following unsightly confusions on special teams, including two straight Green Bay drives that ended in a missed field goal and then an Alex Okafor blocked field goal that stopped Green Bay from scoring before halftime and a muffed punt that grazed a supine Packer which was recovered by Kansas City. It was all par for the course in a game that started out looking like a 45-7 drumming but wound up a ho-hum 13-7 snoozefest. Even the exciting plays were boring – a miraculous bobbled catch by AJ Dillon was overshadowed by the fact that it came directly after Tyrann Mathieu nearly jumped the route and returned a bad Love decision for 6 points. This would have made it 14-0 early and would have really ended the game early; instead it registers as just another notch in a game that wound on and on until, mercifully, it ended with KC running out the clock and successfully avoiding a wild upset at home against a Rodgersless Packers team.
It's sad that we haven’t been able to see Mahomes versus Rodgers yet, which this game promised us up until November 3, just 4 days before this high-octane matchup of recent MVPs was set to ignite. Recall that these teams’ 2019 matchup was itself sabotaged by the sorrow of a missing starter at QB, as Patrick Mahomes was out with a short but scary patellar dislocation. That game, though, was greatly exciting, with senescent stand-in Matt Moore battling Rodgers in a thrilling back-and-forth primetime affair. It’s usually fun when Andy Reid has to make do with a backup QB – he’s done it many times before, with AJ Feely, Koy Detmer, Jeff Blake, Jeff Garcia and Michael Vick (especially Michael Vick) enjoying unexpected success as Donovan McNabb fill-ins in Andy’s Eagles days and the occasional Chase Daniel, Matt Moore or Chad Henne sighting on the Chiefs. Reid rarely limits the playbook for his backup QBs, which we love to see. Matt LaFleur could learn a thing or two about that, as evidenced by Jordan Love’s excitement-dousing debut. He could also learn a thing or two about going for two when you’re down 13 and have just scored a touchdown – but that’s a conversation for another time.
L’Jarius Sneed after intercepting Jordan Love, gesturing to the Arrowhead Crowd as if to say “Are you not entertained?” The answer, of course, was no.