Jordan Love wants a new deal from the Packers and that makes total sense

Football season is back, baby.

At long last we have reached training camp time with various teams reporting across the NFL. As if this weren’t enough last week brought with it the release of College Football 25 and everything feels right in the world once more.

Sure, baseball returned from the All-Star break and the Olympics are about to start. Before we know it the Premier League will be back as well, and hey, the Open Championship was last weekend!

Football is king though and as usual we have thoughts on it all.

Welcome to this week’s Skinny Post. Let’s begin.

Patrick Mahomes made sure to keep CFB 25 a priority while beginning camp

RJ:

As noted training camps are officially happening across the league, even if not every team is present and accounted for. If you have ever been to an NFL training camp before then you know that it can have some summer camp sort of vibes.

This is true because players on some teams often stay in the same area. There aren’t bunk beds or anything, but people being all together feels like Bug Juice which is somehow one of the shows from millennials’ youth that hasn’t gotten a reboot.

Even if you are practicing football for a majority of your time things can get a little boring around parts like these which explains why Patrick Mahomes made sure he didn’t miss out on the new CFB 25 video game. According to SB Nation’s own Pete Sweeney, Mahomes brought a tv to camp for the first time partly to make sure he could play.

The Olympics matter and I am very much looking forward to seeing Scott Hanson on The Gold Zone but close your eyes and look back to the days of your college dorm and remember what it was like on the sticks during NCAA, FIFA or Madden tournaments. The Chiefs are about to live that in real life as professional athletes.

Personally I am three games into my dynasty with Arizona State so I may already be behind Mahomes and his teammates in terms of hours logged, but it is refreshing to see that NFL players are exactly like us in more ways than we realize.

Michael:

It’s been really, really cool to see how much love College Football 25 has received since the majority of people playing were still either kids or teenagers the last time we got the chance to play with out favorite collegiate programs. As people who work in the football media space, it’s been awesome to see the majority of our peers, along with the players, all get this game from day one and refuse to put it down.

Am I playing College Football 25 this very moment? Did I just drop a heartbreaker to Virginia Tech as Old Dominion? The world may never know.

But in all seriousness, there’s so many worse things to be doing as a professional player with your free time then playing virtual football. They get to work on their own mental-processing and keep their competitive fire stoked when they’re also recovering physically.

I’m also very much here for the Olympics coverage. I would honestly do the exact same thing as Mahomes but with his kind of money, I would purchase and entire room just for the televisions (yes, I would bring several more than just one). One room to sleep in, one room to get away and take in the Olympics with his teammates. Bang. Done. Training camp cheat codes.

The NFL will be utilizing a new structure for their kickoffs which should be a revitalizing change for a league that doesn’t often like “new”

Michael:

So I’m super stoked for this change. On a one-year trial basis, the NFL will be changing their kickoff structures to mimic what the XFL league did during their 2020 and 2022 seasons.

Teams will kickoff from the 30-yard line while both teams start five yards from each other on the other side of the field. The kicking team lines up entirely on the 35-yard line while the receiving team faces them on the other 30-yard line. Neither team moves until the ball has been caught by the returner.

This change should be a welcomed sight for those who want to make the game safer while injecting some life into a play that hasn’t seen many changes in its lifespan. What I love most about this is that there’s just the singular line of defense and then the kicker. If special teams coordinators can find a way to break this play wide open, there could be some extremely exciting plays to be had. With the teams essentially grouped up into such a small area, teams may prioritize their best player with a combination of speed and size (or lack thereof) to squeeze through some of the gaps because that basically all it takes to break off a long return.

One mistake and it’s potentially. Does this not sound super cool? I think so.

RJ:

My favorite thing about the new kickoff is that we know literally nothing about it.

All conventional wisdom and thought that we have could be super valuable or it could be utterly meaningless. Outright speed may not wind up being too great of an asset as more patience and a willingness to wait for blocks to develop could be the game-changer.

As a Dallas Cowboys fan one thing I am certain of is that John Fassel, Cowboys’ Special Teams Coordinator if you didn’t know, is going to do anything and everything in his power to capitalize on it and take advantage of our new reality. After all, he was a part of the group that presented the format to league owners and did so well enough that they voted for it.

Bring it on.

Jordan Love is not going to practice until he has a new deal

RJ:

Monday morning brought interesting news as it was reported that the Green Bay Packers will not be seeing any practice from quarterback Jordan Love before he has a brand new deal with the team. Ruh roh, Shaggy.

As dramatic as this sounds it ultimately seems pretty inevitable that Love and the Packers are going to get this thing done. The way that Green Bay is talking makes it sound like they want nothing more than to pay him an enormous amount of money, must be nice to continually find franchise quarterback after franchise quarterback.

Really though, good on Jordan Love. Good on him capitalizing on his moment and cashing in. This isn’t to say that I think that he thinks he can’t play to a high level following an impressive debut season, but today’s price is not yesterday’s. He has every right to chase the bag.

Michael:

Yeah, there’s nothing surprising about this move by Love and his camp. Even though he has just the one season of being a full-time starter under his belt, it was a pretty dang good season for him and the Packers. With one of the youngest and least-experienced receiver groups in the league, Love took the Pack to the playoffs, beat the Cowboys, and finished the year with over 4,000 passing yards and 30 touchdowns.

Green Bay could not have asked for a much better season to follow Aaron Rodgers’ time with the team. Expectations were probably to fall short of the postseason. Luckily for the fans the Packers didn’t skip a beat with a rare first-year starter under center.

I’ve always been a proponent that NFL teams should pay players for what they’ve done, not what the hope they’ll do in the future, but that’s just not the game this league plays. It’s a “pay now or suffer the potential consequences that may last years and years” business. Someone is always willing to pay early and that forces anyone who may want to play the waiting game to pony up faster than they’d like.

At the end of the day, Love played out of his mind with a less-than-stellar supporting cast and he turned into a hell of a year. Kudos to him and I hope he gets the money rightfully deserves.