The Arizona Cardinals puzzled fans when they selected Jeremiyah Love with the third pick of the 2026 NFL Draft. While Love was certainly an elite prospect at Notre Dame, running back was not considered a need for Arizona, which just signed Tyler Allgeier weeks prior.
Love has yet to make the impact expected of a player with his draft capital, primarily due to Arizona's hesitance to give him a hefty workload, and it's not looking like we'll see Love fully unleashed anytime soon. Cardinals coach Mike LaFleur revealed one key element to Love's game that's keeping him from playing more on third downs and passing situations.
“I wasn’t too confident in terms of getting into some of those ‘scat’ protections and stuff like that and five-man protections,” LaFleur said. “We wanted to have that extra body in there. There were a couple of times where I wanted to get him on some choice routes and stuff like that, but like I said I didn’t feel confident that we were going to be able to execute at the level that we needed to."
LaFleur appears to have more confidence in Allgeier's blocking, making him the preferred back in passing situations. That's a massive problem for those who have Love on their fantasy football teams because the Cardinals, one of the NFL's worst teams, will be in passing game scripts for much of the rest of 2026.
What to do with Jeremiyah Love in fantasy football?
It's time to sell Love while you still can in redraft leagues. While he's worth the patience in dynasty leagues, it doesn't appear as if Love will be anything more than a risky RB2 play the rest of this season considering how LaFleur views his backfield.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Jeremiyah Love's path to bigger role facing 1 big snag