The Cardinals Spent a Top-3 Pick to Fix Their Worst Problem. He's Already Hurt.

Here is the number that makes Jeremiyah Love's high-ankle sprain genuinely alarming rather than merely unfortunate: James Conner, the man Love was drafted to eventually replace, produced at roughly a third of what a functional starting running back should generate last season. One-third. That is the foundation Arizona is standing on if Love misses Week 1, and it is the same foundation the franchise just spent the third overall pick to escape.

The running back situation in Arizona was already a documented crisis before Love went down on 23 snaps against the Raiders. Conner is 31 years old, and there is no viable backup behind him with meaningful playing time — the depth chart behind him is populated by names who have not produced in a real NFL game for this organization. That was the hole Love was supposed to fill, not next year, not in year two of his development arc, but now, in 2026, as the immediate answer to a positional need that ranked among the highest on the roster. The Cardinals didn't draft him third overall to be patient with him.

What makes this worse is the context it lands in. This offseason has been a cascading series of structural failures — a front-office gambling scandal, a second-round offensive lineman lost for what could be the entire season with a torn MCL, a backup quarterback situation reduced to Carson Beck nursing a rib injury and Gardner Minshew as the only available option behind Brissett. Love's ankle sprain is not an isolated piece of bad luck. It is the latest entry in a ledger that keeps growing, and it hits the one position where the team had the least margin for error.

The organizational decision to play Love 23 snaps in a preseason game — with the depth chart behind him this thin and the stakes of his health this high — is already drawing scrutiny, and fairly so. High-ankle sprains are not minor inconveniences; they linger, they rob backs of the lateral burst that makes them dangerous, and they have a way of becoming recurring problems. The Cardinals are reportedly hopeful he plays in Week 1, and hope is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

My read is that the deeper problem here is not the injury itself but what it reveals about how little room Arizona built around their most important offseason acquisition. When you take a running back third overall, you are making a statement that this player is central to your offensive identity in 2026. Building that identity around a 31-year-old starter producing at a fraction of positional norms, with no credible backup and now a top pick in a walking boot before the season starts, is not a plan — it is a prayer. The Cardinals went 3-14 last year on prayers. Jonathan Gannon cannot afford another season built on them.