Commentary | Life is short, and standout running back Love is good right now
Drafting Jeremiyah Love as highly as the Cardinals did with the third pick Thursday night will ensure Love the most guaranteed money for a running back in NFL history and give him an average per year salary that already makes him one of the highest paid running backs in the NFL.
And, over the past few weeks, we’ve heard volume after volume of incredible research on the topic, and how it would represent a bad selection, and why teams should be more inclined to focus on positional value at this juncture of the draft. Additional research confirms the fallacy that running backs are often labeled as weapons but are almost always just running backs, which negates the argument that Love is really a running back and a wide receiver. Literally every spring we see the headline on Rotoworld advising us to watch out for [insert running back name here] running routes in practice. It never matters. And the sun rises and the sun sets. We pay taxes and love and get our hearts broken. Then we die.
I say this not to diminish all of the thought and analysis-truly, I work with and alongside a new wave of football writers who are better than at any point in human history-but to offer my own opinion: I truly don’t give a damn about what Love costs relative to another running back and neither should you.
I urge all of you who are labeling me an anti-analytics, anti-common sense or contrarian to climb above the forest for one second. We are in the midst of football’s analytical halcyon days. We have data for everything. Our fandom and our analysis has shifted into the lens of a football executive, who is rated as better or smarter for getting assets that cost less money than other ones while winning football games. Baseball fans went through this during the Moneyball period, shifting the crux of their fandom from the field to the front office, titillating themselves over the idea of Kevin Youkilis accumulating 4.7 WAR despite only making $425,000. That became a measure of success versus actually winning World Series games.
During the height of Moneyball, we had World Series victories from the Cardinals (11th highest payroll in baseball and in possession of Albert Pujols), the payroll juggernaut Yankees, the Phillies (12th highest payroll, and a team that went out soon after and purchased the greatest pitching staff that money could buy). I’m cherry picking examples here, for sure, but the point I’m making is that the owners who invested in their teams monetarily and layered good drafts atop supplemental free agency won the big games.
Modern baseball fans, while still appreciating Statcast data, mostly clamor about payroll. And that’s not my observation; that is the observation of people who have covered the sport and thought about it at a deeper level than I could ever fathom. It’s cool for owners to spend money.
We’re headed in that direction in the NFL, just lagging a few miles behind. While Major League Baseball only has a luxury tax to curb spending, the NFL’s salary cap is more fugazi than a politician’s tax returns. How many times have we stressed about the impact of dead money for example, only to watch a team thrive in spite of it. We parse each new contract at a premium position like it’s an ancient religious text because we don’t realize the truth: The cap is an extraordinarily convenient excuse for owners not to pay players their actual worth.
And if the cap is fugazi, then everything that exists inside of it, and all the false precedent that pours into reconciling the money into what we consider standard operating procedure, are then, in turn, largely all fugazi as well.
While we’re on this point, we talk about NFL salary cap planning like it’s a Colonial Penn life insurance commercial; like we’re planning for something that will actually be even slightly reminiscent of the entity it currently is three, four or five years down the road. Most head coaches barely make it three seasons now. The turnover in this league is extraordinary and, with it, so too eventually goes the general manager and the cap strategist that put this precious plan into place. Seriously, we are not that far removed from imagining the Robert Saleh–Aaron Rodgers partnership. Saleh is on his second job since the Jets. Rodgers (I guess?) plays for the Steelers.
This is a very long way of saying that Love can help the Cardinals now. He is an extraordinary game-breaking presence now, a willing blocker now, a selfless teammate now and one of the best short-yardage backs that we’ve seen come out over the last decade. Now. Everything that exists from that point on is meaningless. If he provides an excellent five years and then is difficult to handle at the negotiating table, what a wonderful problem to have. There is someone in the building making an exorbitant amount of money to the lay person whose job it is to massage several other players’ extensions and square the cap calculations in a way that makes sense. If that person can’t do it, fire them and hire someone else who can.
If he is as good as people think he is-and good enough to justify being taken 20th or 30th, where there would be less scrutiny-then I highly doubt the fan base will return to this moment agonizing over the unusually high APY starting point.
I’m never one to celebrate a take that is anti-economics or anti-mathematics. I believe that analytical thinking has added an immeasurable benefit to every walk of life. But I believe, like we’ve seen in baseball, that we’ll reach a point where that way of thinking causes us to overthink. We’ve reached that point with Jeremiyah Love, who, in the eyes of the Cardinals, is worth every penny. That should be good enough for us.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Life Is Short, and Jeremiyah Love Is Good Right Now.
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This story was originally published April 23, 2026 at 5:32 PM.