GREEN BAY, Wis. — Packers head coach Matt LaFleur asked three questions at his season-ending press conference Tuesday and answered each immediately with one word.

The first centered around his 26-year-old, $220 million quarterback.

“Do I think he can play better? Absolutely,” LaFleur said of Jordan Love. “Do I think I can help him out and be better? Absolutely. Do I think we can play better around him? Absolutely.”

LaFleur is right. He and Love need to be better for the Packers to ultimately achieve what they want, a Super Bowl, as does Love’s supporting cast of blockers and pass catchers on offense. It’s often difficult to accurately assess praise and blame without knowing exactly what goes into each play — who made the call, what the priorities are before and after the snap, if each player fulfilled their assignment, etc.

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For example, likely nobody outside the building would’ve known that wide receiver Malik Heath was partially at fault for Love’s second interception against the Eagles because he ran his route 5 yards too shallow until LaFleur revealed as much two days after his team’s season ended.

So it’s difficult to say just how much better the head coach and quarterback need to be or, on the other end of the spectrum, exactly how good each was during Green Bay’s 11-win season without dissecting each play with coaches and/or players while hooking them up to a lie detector.

The only thing that’s certain for now is that, while the Packers need more from LaFleur and Love for the team to reach its full potential, they’re still the right head coach and quarterback to lead the organization forward in its pursuit of a Super Bowl. Even if a section of the fanbase seems to feel otherwise in the wake of this season’s disappointing end.

“I think there’s obviously areas that I improved on, that the team improved on, and there’s some stuff I want to clean up, be better at, for sure,” Love said. “That’s the nature of the game. It’s never going to be perfect. There’s always going to be things to get better at, improve on. But that’ll definitely be part of the offseason. Just go back, watch the games, make lists of things I can improve on and be better at. But I think we did some really good things as an offense and I think there’s a lot of stuff that we left out there that we could have done a lot better.”

For LaFleur, he had issues with clock management, some play calling and discipline relating to his team’s post-play penalties. His team was 0-6 against the NFC’s three best teams and he couldn’t help rectify the offense’s slow starts that plagued the Packers against those teams.

No matter how much fault he carried in those instances, at least part of it lies on the head coach who calls the offense. Yet he’s the head coach of a team that just became the second-youngest one by average age to make the playoffs in the last 45 years, trailing only the team LaFleur coached in 2023 while winning two more games than last season. Even if it’s hard to put the finger on every specific thing LaFleur has done right and wrong, it’s impossible to deny he’s an above-average coach in the NFL, perhaps even better.

We all saw what LaFleur did with an offense quarterbacked by Malik Willis. It was the stuff of an offensive genius. And though the Packers’ offense sputtered to the finish line this season, LaFleur still saw growth on that side of the ball as they finished eighth in points per game and fifth in yards per game after finishing 12th and 11th in those categories, respectively, last season.

For Love, he needs to improve his footwork, accuracy and decision-making at times (the newsiest bit from Tuesday was that longtime Packers QB coach Tom Clements is retiring, so Love will have another position coach teaching him all that). Love wasn’t nearly good enough late this season, but he also had a supremely efficient stretch of games after Green Bay’s bye week — LaFleur said that was the best football he’d ever seen Love play — so it’s not like the second half of this season was all bad. He has plenty of room to grow before Green Bay realistically enters title contention, but there have been enough flashes of playmaking ability, sack and interception avoidance, and pristine arm strength and accuracy to believe the $220 million extension was a wise investment given the point Love was at in his contract and what the market dictated.

Love ranks eighth in EPA per dropback and 14th in passer rating since the start of the 2023 season, according to TruMedia. Those numbers are modest, especially considering the money he’s making. But it’s worthwhile acknowledging that Love’s career wasn’t going to be linear and he’s still only started two seasons. He played at a near-MVP level in the second half of his first season as a starter and was unlikely to replicate that. He took a step back and was inconsistent this season, in part because of multiple injuries but also because of regression, and now must ensure that trend reverses.

“I love Jordan Love and how he competes and the work he puts in and I think he’s going to get better and better and better,” LaFleur said. “And certainly there’s some lessons along the way, some tough lessons, any time you end up in defeat. That’s hard to deal with. But he is very critical of himself and he does such a great job of learning from every experience, so I think through this we’ll all be better for it.”

Count Tucker Kraft as someone who believes in Love, too.

“He’s just a killer,” the second-year tight end said Monday. “Jordan has that mentality. He has that mindset. I’m not sure I’ve seen someone more confident in the people around him because of the leadership that he provides for the team, that serving leadership.

“He’s going to lead from the front. He’s going to bring everybody up around him. He expects a lot of us and he shows that with the way he puts the ball in certain positions, whether he’s throwing it down the red line to the wideout or he’s just propping the ball up on one of my shoulders and giving me a chance to drop-step, get vertical. It’s just about the way he trusts us to perform. We’ve got to get on his rhythm.”

Cornerback Keisean Nixon, when asked if LaFleur and Love are the right pair to lead the team to a Super Bowl, said, “It will never just be (on) Matt or on Jordan.” And he too is right, as the head coach and quarterback will look better if the pass catchers do the catching part far better than they did this season (Green Bay ranked sixth-worst in drops with 29, per Pro Football Focus) and if the offensive line blocks far better than it did against the Eagles.

Even if the Packers’ offense improved on paper from last season, the last couple of games and Love’s dip in 2024 leave a sour taste. So too does how the second season of a new era concluded after the first raised expectations perhaps ahead of schedule in this organizational retool.

Such is life in Green Bay, constantly striving for a level others would do anything for. So yes, it’s understandable to be frustrated with the head coach and quarterback, but don’t be so quick to throw either of them overboard.