Tough loss teaches Jordan Love, young Packers lessons for the future

The Green Bay Packers should have beaten the Atlanta Falcons in Week 2. 

That's no disrespect meant to the Falcons, either. It's just the truth about playing in the NFL. If you've got a 12-point lead in the fourth quarter, that's a game you have to win in order to be a good team.

Perhaps that means the Packers aren't a good team — and there's a case to be made since their defense once again struggled with a seemingly decade long inability to stop the run. More realistically, though, the Packers and new quarterback Jordan Love suffered from a case of inexperience.

Love had a chance to win the game for Green Bay, getting the ball with 57 seconds to go in the game after a field goal put Atlanta up, 25-24. 

Sure, he had no timeouts and was starting on his own 25, but all Green Bay's offense needed to do was get into field goal range to give big-legged rookie kicker Anders Carlson a chance to win it. All Love needed to do was complete a few passes in order to get things moving.

Instead, he and the offense went 0-for-4 and the game was over. 

They didn't move a yard, but that doesn't mean Love and this young Packers offense can't take something from this failure.

It's tough to win in the NFL. You can have the talent — which Love seems to have — and you can have the scheme. You have to play perfect in order to win in crunch-time situations, though. Love and the Packers learned that the hard way.

“I think the last possessions of the game are good lessons for all of us, how we have to execute,” Love told the media after the game, per ESPN. “Every play matters in this league and there’s stuff to clean up right there. And, you know, we’ll look at the tape and see what we did. But it just comes down to execution.”

It would have been great for Love to pull it off. What a notch it would have been in his belt early on in his career. What fear it would have struck in the hearts of the rest of the NFC North — that perhaps the Packers have done it again at quarterback.

He didn't pull it off, but as cornerback Jaire Alexander explained, that doesn't mean he won't in the future.

“That'd been amazing,” Alexander said. “But it didn't happen, so we gotta do better next week.”