TEMPE, Ariz.
The Arizona Cardinals will play the most important game of their young season so far without the player they drafted to transform their offense. Head coach Mike LaFleur confirmed on Friday, October 16, that rookie running back Jeremiyah Love will miss Sunday's Week 6 game against the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium with a left-ankle injury, according to Reuters, in a report carried by Field Level Media. Love did not practice at all this week, sitting out for a third straight day on Friday, and the team decided that rest, not another managed week, is what the injury now requires.
The announcement, also reported by the Arizona Republic on azcentral and by Cards Wire, part of USA Today, ends a week of quiet concern in Tempe. Love is the No. 3 overall pick in the 2026 draft out of Notre Dame, a selection the Cardinals made as a statement about how they intend to build: around a home-run running back who can tilt a defense on any snap. On Sunday in Inglewood, that weapon stays home, and a 1-4 team that can ill afford another loss has to find its offense somewhere else. Kickoff is set for 1:05 p.m. Arizona time, with the Rams entering at 2-3 in a division race neither team planned to be chasing from behind.
No Injured Reserve, and a Monday Re-Evaluation
The most important detail in LaFleur's Friday update may be what is not happening. According to the reports, there has been no discussion of placing Love on injured reserve, the move that would sideline him for a minimum stretch of games and signal a far more serious problem. Instead, the Cardinals will re-evaluate him on Monday, after the Rams game, and LaFleur framed the decision as one made in the player's best interest: a week of rest now, rather than another week of pushing through an ankle that has been bothering him for weeks and visibly limiting what he can do.
That framing matters because it separates this absence from a season-altering injury. A first missed game, a coach declining to talk about injured reserve, and a re-evaluation scheduled for the very next day all point to a team managing a lingering problem week to week, not shutting down its franchise rookie. Cardinals fans have seen the other kind of announcement often enough to know the difference in tone, and Friday's news, while unwelcome, was delivered in the language of caution rather than alarm.
Two Ankles, Two Different Stories
Understanding Sunday's absence means separating two injuries that are easy to blur together. In the preseason, Love suffered a high-ankle sprain, and that injury was to his right ankle. It happened on August 13 in a preseason game against the Las Vegas Raiders, the kind of setback that can quietly derail a rookie's first training camp. Love recovered in time to return for the regular-season opener, an encouraging sign that the right ankle had healed on schedule and that the Cardinals' investment had survived its first scare intact.
The current problem is the other ankle. Discomfort in Love's left ankle surfaced around Week 4, in the game against the New York Giants, when trainers were repeatedly seen checking on him during the game. Since then, according to the reporting around the team, the Cardinals have managed his workload, limiting the strain in practice and in games while hoping the ankle would settle down. It did not settle enough. A full week without a single practice, capped by Friday's ruling, is the team acknowledging that management has reached its limit and that genuine rest is the next step.
Ankle injuries for a running back are rarely just about pain. Love's game is built on planting, cutting and accelerating out of a break, movements that ask everything of both ankles on every carry. A back playing on a compromised ankle is not merely a diminished version of himself; he is a player defenses can defend differently, without fearing the cutback or the burst that made him a top-three pick in the first place.
A Rookie Season Still Looking for Its Rhythm
The numbers through five games tell the story of a talented rookie whose season has never quite caught fire. Love has rushed for 245 yards and one touchdown in five games, with four starts, and he has added 11 catches for 36 yards and a receiving touchdown. His average sits at 3.7 yards per carry, respectable in isolation but well short of the explosive efficiency Arizona imagined when it called his name in April. Those figures were reported consistently across Reuters, the Arizona Republic and Cards Wire in Friday's coverage.
The low point came last week against Detroit, when Love carried 12 times for a season-low 22 yards. A stat line like that, for a player of his pedigree, reads less like a talent problem and more like a symptom: a back who could not plant and drive, running behind an offense that could not give him room, in a game that got away from a 1-4 team. In hindsight, the Detroit performance looks like the clearest public evidence that the left ankle had become more than a nuisance. Friday's decision, then, is not a reaction to one bad afternoon. It is the end of a three-week slide the whole league could watch happening in the open.
Allgeier and Knight Get the Backfield
With Love out, the Cardinals' carries fall to Tyler Allgeier and Bam Knight, who will handle the backfield duties on Sunday, according to Friday's reports. It is a different kind of backfield: less built around a single featured runner, more likely to divide work by situation, with the hot hand and the game script deciding who sees the ball in the fourth quarter. Against a Rams team that is itself trying to climb back to .500, Arizona's ability to run the ball at all may decide whether its offense can stay balanced or becomes one-dimensional by halftime.
There is also a longer calculation at work, and the Cardinals are not hiding it. Love is 21 years old, five games into a career the franchise expects to last a decade, and the cost of one Sunday in October is small next to the cost of turning a lingering ankle problem into a chronic one. Sitting him, as LaFleur put it in the reporting, is in the player's best interest, and it is hard to argue with the arithmetic: a re-evaluation on Monday, a home game against Denver in Week 7 waiting after that, and a rookie whose best football is supposed to be in front of him, not behind him in a September he spent getting healthy.
What to Watch on Sunday
For Cardinals fans, Sunday's game at SoFi Stadium now carries two storylines at once. The first is immediate: can a 1-4 team, missing its most gifted offensive player, go on the road and beat a division rival to keep its season from slipping into irrelevance before Halloween? The second is quieter and, in the long run, larger: what does Monday's re-evaluation say, and does Love's left ankle respond to a week of rest the way the team hopes? Practice reports next week will be read in Tempe the way injury reports for franchise players always are, one participation line at a time.
More Cardinals and NFL coverage lives on our sports hub. For more from today's newsroom, see our report on the Eagles turning to Tanner McKee and our recap of the Golden Knights' win over the Flames. This story will be updated after Monday's re-evaluation.
