Arizona Cardinals Camp Update — August 9: Jeremiyah Love Isn't First Out of the Backfield Yet

In July we said Arizona's season wasn't really about 2026 — a bounce profile worth five to seven wins against a three-and-a-half market number, with the real scoreboard being whether Jeremiyah Love looks like a third overall pick, whether Trey McBride's target monopoly survives the coordinator change, and whether the quarterback bridge holds long enough for Carson Beck to answer the 2027 question. We also flagged the bridge's toll dispute: Jacoby Brissett's hold-in.

Camp resolved the dispute fast and then got on with the audition.

Brissett signed his reworked contract on Sunday, July 26, and was back with the first team by Tuesday, per Tyler Drake's reporting at Arizona Sports — ending a hold-in that had him, in the Associated Press' description, "mostly relegated to the sidelines" through the first days of camp. His practice file since is two honest halves. Albert Breer's takeaway from his Glendale stop was that Brissett made a good early impression with the contract behind him. Mike LaFleur called the July 31 practice Arizona's best of camp. Then Sunday, August 2, was his worst — two interceptions, both caught by rookie linebacker Cody Simon, and what Drake described as an inability to find rhythm in 11-on-elevens after not having turned it over since rejoining the ones. A midweek ESPN camp report had him back to a workmanlike 15-of-23. Bridge quarterbacking, rendered in practice-chart form.

Now the rookie the whole rebuild is staked on, because the reporting comes in two flavors and they don't fully agree. The tape flavor: Love has looked, in the words of nearly everyone in the building, like the pick. Brissett to the AP in week one: "I see why we paid him $50 million — that's for sure." Arizona Sports' camp coverage catalogued the shiftiness and playmaking through the padless work. When defensive lineman Darius Robinson brought Love down late in one practice, center Jon Gaines II started camp's first scuffle defending him — the tell of a locker room that has already decided what he is.

The usage flavor is where the honesty comes in: Tyler Allgeier, not Love, has been first out of the backfield in all but one open portion of practice, per Arizona Sports — with James Conner still working back toward team drills and Trey Benson, whose 2025 ended with a week-four knee injury, drawing "looked as fast as he has as a Cardinal" notes in ESPN's camp file this week. Gilberto Manzano, visiting for SI on August 3, got the coach's framing directly: LaFleur says the room will ride the hot hand. Nothing in the camp reporting has Love seizing a workhorse role, and we won't pretend otherwise — what it has is a four-back rotation with the third overall pick as its most talented member. In July we wrote that three-and-14 teams don't draft a back third overall to split work. That logic still stands. It just hasn't shown up in the pecking order yet, and August is when it would start to.

Beck's file is the most rookie-shaped thing in camp. Drake charted the early struggles — no consistency on intermediate-to-deep throws, including a badly errant ball to a wide-open Love in the corner of the end zone on the first open practice day — and Beck slid to third-team reps once Brissett returned, behind Gardner Minshew. Then this week's ESPN camp report had his best day yet, headlined by exactly the deep ball the team drafted him to develop, on a day Minshew threw a pick to the ubiquitous Simon. Two clean conclusions from that: the December question from the preview is alive, and Cody Simon is having himself a camp.

One more item with a genuine delta: second-round guard Chase Bisontis has begun creeping into second-team work at right guard, per Arizona Sports — the first visible movement in a battle the beat flagged entering camp. On a line whose repair was the offseason's most direct answer to 59 sacks allowed, an interior rookie forcing the issue is the kind of small development that compounds.

Quiet files, noted as quiet: no camp reporting we can attribute has moved Marvin Harrison Jr.'s or Trey McBride's stories in either direction this window — no news on the healthy receiver is itself the good version of no news.

Does the July framing hold? Confirmed, on every front we named. The bridge is paid and performing like a bridge. The rookie looks like the pick while the staff makes him earn the volume. The evaluation project is oscillating exactly the way third-round rookie quarterbacks oscillate. Even the market-disagreement half — that this roster is better than the worst in football — got a small camp echo in how much functioning talent the practice reports keep naming.

What would change it: whether Love starts taking the first-team backfield's opening reps before the preseason opener, and whether Beck's deep-ball day was a day or a direction — his preseason snaps are the first public evidence either way. We'll check Sunday.

_Data via nflverse._