Jordan Love had the tidiest possible "Year 3 leap" season in 2025: same yardage, half the interceptions, and an offense that ranked as the NFL's most efficient passing attack. The Packers finished first in the league in pass EPA per play at +0.242, up from +0.117 a year earlier — a jump big enough that the story writes itself as either "Love figured out the deep ball" or "Matthew Golden gave him a real WR1."

Neither is really what happened. The Packers' 2025 leap is almost entirely an intermediate-throw story, and it was captured almost entirely by the second half of the target chart.

Table of Contents

• The macro number
• The bucket that moved
• The receiver-by-receiver ledger
• Doubs, the constant
• What it means

The macro number

Here is Love's line, cleanly, 2024 vs. 2025:

Yards, attempts, and touchdowns are basically identical. What jumped was accuracy over expectation (CPOE), and EPA per dropback essentially doubled.

The bucket that moved

Split Green Bay's dropbacks by air yards and the picture gets much more specific. This is every GB pass attempt (sacks excluded) in the regular season, bucketed by target depth:

Almost every popular version of the "Love took a leap" take is a deep-ball story. But on 16+ air-yard throws, the Packers' 2025 EPA/play (+0.717) actually came in slightly below their 2024 mark (+0.776). They didn't throw deep more often, either — deep share dropped from 23.6% to 21.9%. The deep ball is not what changed.

The intermediate bucket is what changed, and it changed enormously. On 6-to-15 air-yard throws — which stayed at roughly the same share of the offense (28.0% → 26.4%) — Green Bay went from +0.079 EPA/play with a −4.46 CPOE to +0.443 EPA/play with a +6.54 CPOE. Across the league that took Green Bay from 30th in intermediate EPA/play in 2024 to 6th in 2025. In CPOE terms it's roughly an eleven-point accuracy swing on the most heavily-thrown depth zone in football, which is the entire ballgame.

The receiver-by-receiver ledger

Here is where the story sharpens. This is every Green Bay pass-catcher with at least five intermediate (6–15 air yards) targets in either season:

Dontayvion Wicks, who was catastrophic on middle throws in 2024 (−13.36 CPOE on 31 targets, one of the worst intermediate marks by any qualifying WR in the league that year), came back a completely different player: +17.08 CPOE on 17 targets, +0.814 EPA per target. That is roughly a 30-point CPOE swing for the same player in the same scheme.

Christian Watson went from +3.25 to +11.40. Tucker Kraft, on a small nine-target sample, produced +1.606 EPA/play with a +31.63 CPOE — the kind of number that only shows up when a tight end is beating the defense to a specific window on a specific concept over and over. Rookie Matthew Golden's introduction (+15.04 CPOE on eight intermediate targets) is directionally consistent with the same thing. And Luke Musgrave, when healthy enough to see targets, ran +30.62 CPOE on his seven intermediate looks.

Roll the non-Doubs group up and the math is stark. In 2024, GB's non-Doubs receivers on 6–15 air-yard throws combined for roughly break-even EPA and a strongly negative CPOE — Wicks alone dragged them there. In 2025 that same secondary group ran comfortably north of +0.7 EPA per target with a double-digit positive CPOE. The intermediate offense didn't just get better; a specific subset of the roster got dramatically better at it.

Doubs, the constant

Now compare that to Green Bay's actual target leader. Romeo Doubs finished 2025 first on the team in targets (86, ahead of Watson's 55 and Kraft's 44) and remains the primary intermediate option by volume. His intermediate line:

Same number of targets. Same completion rate over expectation (basically zero, both years). Marginally better EPA per target. On the intermediate throws that drove the entire team's leap, the highest-target player on the roster essentially didn't change. This is not a knock — Doubs stayed steady on 86 total targets, ran a +5.04 CPOE across all depths in 2025, and quietly logged six touchdowns. It's just that he isn't where the team's step forward came from.

What it means

The Packers' passing offense in 2025 was, in a genuine sense, a different offense than in 2024 — but the difference is in a specific place that most narratives haven't landed on:

• Not a deep-ball breakout. Deep-ball EPA/play was slightly lower in 2025 than 2024, on a slightly smaller share of dropbacks.
• Not a scheme-wide redistribution. The intermediate share of the offense (26.4%) barely moved from 2024 (28.0%).
• Not a target-leader story. Doubs' intermediate line barely moved; his total-offense line grew modestly.
• Very much a WR2/WR3/TE story. Wicks, Watson, Kraft, Golden, and Musgrave collectively went from a drag to the best subgroup on the roster on intermediate throws, and that group's improvement is roughly the size of the whole team's leap.

For 2026 planning, my read is that the interesting question isn't "can Love make another jump" but "how much of this specific improvement is Love vs. how much lives with the pass-catchers?" A +30-point CPOE swing on Dontayvion Wicks on the same routes against similar coverages doesn't obviously repeat — a lot of intermediate CPOE is chunky at these sample sizes. But the fact that essentially every non-Doubs receiver moved the same direction, on the same depth band, in the same season, suggests that whatever Green Bay figured out on middle-of-the-field concepts is at least partly real and partly transferable. If it holds, this offense has another gear beyond what it showed at #1 in pass EPA. If it regresses, the Packers were the league's most efficient passing team in 2025 largely because five secondary pass-catchers caught intermediate throws they used to drop — and that is a much thinner foundation than a rising-star quarterback narrative would suggest.