Jordan Love is Box Office

Jordan Love is Box Office

GuyWhoLikesSport

There are a few things that, in my view, are consistent across movies that box office smashes:

  • They’re always fun to watch in some way,
  • There is usually some artistic merit to them, but they aren’t generally masterpieces, and
  • You always leave the theatre satisfied, if not necessarily fulfilled.

Obviously, there are exceptions.

Oppenheimer, for instance, was widely considered a work of art and made upwards of $1bn (I thought particularly the first half was mediocre and I truly hate Christopher Nolan’s fetish with time, but that’s a piece for another day).

I thought about what makes a box office smash, and how Love fits into that, as I was watching him march the ball down the field to win the game against the Houston Texans.

In the game, Love was perfectly himself, throwing three touchdowns, two picks, and chucked it into a billion tight windows just to see if he could.

Love is obviously a good player. He’s mobile, has an incredibly elastic arm, and he has extraordinary self-confidence to hunt big game.

All of that also makes him fun to watch, but while both Avengers and Oppenheimer are fun to watch, only one won best picture.

So which version of box office titan is Jordan Love?

Is he the artistically meritorious one that used to be made by Steven Spielberg, brilliantly blending art and commerce to make a film that is as fun to watch as it is good?

Or is he a superhero movie, more focused on being fun to watch than being particularly good.

On the season, Love has thrown for 15 passing touchdowns, good for second in the league, after missing two games and first in touchdown percentage.

He’s also second in the league in passing yards per game, and fifth in the league in air yards per completion.

Among players who have played more than 200 plays, he’s eighth in EPA/play.

That’s the good, which is looking more like Oppenheimer, right?

Well, there’s bad, too.

Love leads the NFL in interceptions despite missing two games, and he’s thrown some absolute doozies.

He’s also 15th in success rate, 30th in throw on target percentage and is 26th in completion percentage over expectation.

Love has been unlucky on some of the picks, but the pattern is of a high-variance quarterback who takes all threes and no layups.

Maybe it is just fun to watch, and nothing more than that?

The Jordan Love throw to Jayden Reed against the Rams, one of the dumbest, best throws I have ever seen,

It is also the perfect encapsulation of why I think Jordan Love is the NFL equivalent of Tom Cruise riding his motorbike off a mountain in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1.

The throw to Reed, like the jump, is so dangerous and so fun to watch. He chucks it is into triple coverage, off play action, in the first quarter.

It wasn’t a desperation heave when you had no other option.

But Love threw it anyway, because that’s what he does.

For most that would be dumb, even if it worked and the whole Packers team is built like Jordan Love plays quarterback, so Love fits perfectly.

The Packers have the sixth best defence by EPA/play and the fourth worst by success rate.

That means they make splash plays, the Packers have the most turnovers on the year, the second most hurries, and the equal sixth most sacks.

It doesn’t matter that they give up a successful play on exactly half of opponent pass passes, the other half are turnovers or sucks.

It’s the same as Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible movies. He could have got a stuntman. He could have even done a less nuts stunt. But he’s Tom Cruise, this is what he does.

Tom Cruise, like Jordan Love on his bonkers throws, knows the success or failure of these Mission movies essentially is based on the stunts.

He needs to do it to succeed.

So, in summary, based on the build and the fact that Green Bay is 5-2 and eighth in DVOA, Love is more Oppenheimer than Avengers.

I actually think Jordan Love probably identifies with Cillian Murphy’s J Robert Oppenheimer.

In the conversation just before Trinity, Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves are discussing what might happen when they test the bomb.

Oppenheimer says, much to Groves’ shock, that the chances of the Trinity test setting fire to the atmosphere and blowing up the world are “near zero”.

Groves, in a Nolan attempt at doing a joke, which is hard for a movie without really any heart, says incredulously that he would prefer that the chances of blowing up the world are “zero”.

That’s how I imagine Jordan Love talks to his coach Matt LaFleur while he’s thinking about making another insane throw that might work or might not.

I think of him lying through his teeth and saying something like, “the chances of this throw failing are near zero”.

But instead of pushing back and stressing about what might happen, LaFleur tells him to let it f**king rip.

Maybe it blows up the world if it doesn’t work. But if it does work, it changes everything.