Jeremiyah Love Camp Update — August 23: The Ankle Is a High Ankle Sprain
2026 NFL Season · Sunday, Aug 23
The ankle Love tweaked in his fourteen-touch debut came back as a high ankle sprain, and the third overall pick went the entire week without a practice rep before sitting out the Cowboys game. The coach's official position is now five words long: it's an ankle, we'll keep it at that.
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Jeremiyah Love's ankle — the one that ended his debut against the Raiders and initially drew a not-serious label — is a high ankle sprain. The diagnosis surfaced through ESPN's reporting, relayed in Darren Urban's injury file at the team website, and the timeline moved with it, from a few days to week-to-week. Head coach Mike LaFleur's public posture shifted the same direction: a day earlier he had been specific — Love "came in yesterday a little bit more sore than he left," so the team would hold him out and "let it heal," per the Associated Press — and by Sunday he was down to "It's an ankle. We'll keep it at that," per Urban. Love did not practice all week and sat Saturday's 34 to 13 loss to Dallas.
The national conversation moved to prosecution in the meantime. Wynston Wilcox at FanSided wrote that Arizona's handling "backfired," pointing at 14 touches across three first-half drives in an exhibition for a rookie the franchise drafted third overall; LaFleur defended the workload as planned for "a rookie that hadn't played," per the same piece. The injury is fact and the malpractice framing is opinion — the same coach sat every established starter he could this week — but the debate exists because the stakes are exactly as high as the draft slot says.
The room around him did not use the opening: James Conner still has no timeline for team drills and Trey Benson has a knee flareup, per Tyler Drake at Arizona Sports, so the job is, if anything, less contested than when Love got hurt. Back in June we said snap share was the thing to watch on this rookie, and camp had been answering fast — first-team drive-openers in practice, then the start-caliber debut; the ankle froze that answer in place, and the featured version of Love remains the last one anybody saw on a field.
Watch whether Love practices at all before Friday's finale at Green Bay, and what the first Week One injury-report language says about the opener. We'll check after cut day.
_Data via nflverse._
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