The Arizona Cardinals injury news out of camp is about as gentle as injury news gets: rookie running back Jeremiyah Love will miss the next week with a sore ankle, the one he tweaked Thursday night against the Raiders. Head coach Mike LaFleur said the plan is to let it heal. No surgery talk, no boot talk, no timeline that stretches into September. A week.
And yet I keep chewing on it, because August reps are the only currency a rookie running back has.
Here is what a week actually costs him. Not conditioning, he'll keep that. It's the boring stuff that decides whether a rookie back is trusted in Week 1: pass protection rules, who he's picking up when the linebacker walks down, how he sets his feet against a live rusher instead of a coach holding a bag. Backs who can run and can't protect end up watching third down from the sideline. That's not a knock on Love, it's just the tax every rookie pays, and he's paying it on a stationary bike.
The part I like is LaFleur's math. A sore ankle in mid-August that gets stubborn in late August becomes a soft-tissue problem in September, and soft-tissue problems in September have a nasty habit of following a guy around all fall. Buying it back now with a week of nothing is the cheapest deal on the table. Coaches who force a rookie through a sore ankle to win a preseason snap count are solving the wrong problem.
He's got company in the ankle ward, too. The reporting Friday had Geno Smith scratched from the Jets' preseason opener with his own sore ankle from Wednesday, day to day. August does this every single year. Ankles roll in traffic, guys sit a week, most of them are fine.
What I'm watching next: whether Love returns to full team work when the week is up, or whether "a week" quietly becomes ten days and then a game he doesn't dress for. The first version is a non-story. The second version is how a rookie loses a job he never got to compete for. Watch the practice reports, not the calendar.
