Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to do deep dives at every position on the Green Bay Packers’ roster, touching on every single player currently on the 91-man team. Today, we’re going to start with the quarterback position, where there’s no drama around who will be QB1, but three of the four quarterbacks in the room are new faces — a byproduct of trying to find a new backup post-Malik Willis.
Jordan Love
Jordan Love is a franchise quarterback. By almost any metric, he’s been worth his contract thus far with the Packers. Based on his effort last year, despite starting the season with a torn thumb ligament, he finished 6th in passer rating, 6th in adjusted net yards per attempt, 3rd in QBR and 1st in win probability added among starters.
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He’s not putting up the 40-plus touchdown seasons that Aaron Rodgers has had in the past, in part because the Packers’ goal line answer is often just handing the ball off to running back Josh Jacobs, but the efficiency is there. Honestly, the biggest question around the Packers’ passing game moving forward is just if they’ll ever scale it up.
In 2025, Green Bay ran the football 48 percent of the time — the fifth most in the league — and the team likes to play multiple back or tight end sets at an above-average rate, too. Will Matt LaFleur open up the passing game to take advantage of Love’s efficiency more in 2026? That’s the burning question around QB1.
After the draft, the Packers signed veteran quarterback Tyrod Taylor, who now has the inside track to the QB2 job. As a starter in Buffalo from 2015 to 2017, Taylor went 22-20, but he’s gone 7-11-1 in the eight years since, mostly coming in as an injury replacement.
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Since Buffalo, the now-36-year-old has posted a passer rating of 80.5, including a 72.9 season with the New York Jets last year. I think one of the more telling stats that show his age, though, is actually his rushing numbers. With Buffalo, he averaged 35.8 yards per game on the ground. Since Buffalo, he’s down to 17 yards per game, though he was up to 23.8 per game with the Jets last year.
While he did sign a one-year, $2.5 million contract, only $700,000 of that is guaranteed, less than the amount the Packers paid out to kicker Brandon McManus this offseason before releasing him. The going rate for solidified backups right now is in the $5 million per year range, too, so Taylor sort of splits the difference between that and a minimum deal.
Taylor will likely be Green Bay’s backup quarterback in 2026, but Taylor’s contract puts the Packers in a position where they’ll want to get a look at him before the regular season before making that full commitment. If Taylor makes the team in Week 1, his salary will fully guarantee for the remainder of the season — due to his status as a vested veteran.
In 2025, Kyle McCord was picked in the sixth round by the Philadelphia Eagles after college stints at Ohio State and Syracuse. The Philly native spent his entire rookie season on the Eagles’ practice squad, as Philadelphia kept Jalen Hurts, Tanner McKee and Sam Howell at the position on the 53-man roster.
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With reserves in the preseason, McCord went 24 of 56 (43 percent) for 191 yards (3.4 yards per pass) with one touchdown and two interceptions.
When both the Eagles and Packers’ seasons ended, McCord signed a reserve-futures deal (basically a minimum contract that practice squaders sign) with Green Bay. Worth noting: The Packers elected to keep McCord over Desmond Ridder, who the team signed as their emergency quarterback for the playoffs, when Green Bay signed Tyrod Taylor.
The Ridder-Taylor decision happened right after the Packers’ rookie minicamp, the first time McCord got extensive on-field work with the team.
Currently, the hope is probably that McCord can push Taylor for the QB2 job while also competing with undrafted rookie Kyron Drones for a practice squad spot as a consolation prize.
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Kyron Drones
LaFleur has mentioned several times that it’s tough to rep four quarterbacks throughout camp, but they seem to be alright with the numbers that they’re at currently. The fourth man in the pecking order right now is former Virginia Tech quarterback Kyron Drones.
When I’ve talked to people in the scouting community, the overall theme I’ve been told about Drones is that he’s got NFL arm talent and is a true dual-threat quarterback, but that he developed some bad on-field habits toward the end of his college career while playing behind a poor offensive line and with poor pass-catchers. At Tech, he completed 58 percent of his passes and threw for 44 touchdowns to 18 interceptions as a three-year starter, but he also scored 20 rushing touchdowns. As a starter, he had a 14-18 record, including a 3-9 season in 2025.
Per Over The Cap, Drones received a modest $5,000 signing bonus, the only guarantees in his contract, to join the Packers. For perspective, Jalon Daniels, Jack Strand, Joey Aguilar, Haynes King and Miller Moss, five other undrafted rookie free agent quarterbacks from the 2026 class, all received guarantees north of $200,000.
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If Drones makes the team in 2026, it will likely be as a practice squadder. Based on his raw talent, though, there is the possibility that an extra year in the oven could lead to him taking over the backup quarterback position in 2027, depending on how things break.
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