Jeremiyah Love At No. 3: The Highest Running Back Taken Since Saquon Barkley In 2018

The Arizona Cardinals made the pick the analytics crowd has spent a decade insisting no team should make. With the No. 3 overall selection in the 2026 NFL Draft, they took Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love — the highest a running back has been drafted since Saquon Barkley went No. 2 to the Giants in 2018. The slot comes with a rookie contract worth roughly $54 million, nearly $20 million more than any running back has ever signed coming out of the draft. Arizona did not stumble into this. They looked at the modern position-value orthodoxy, and they spent the third pick in the draft on a ball carrier anyway.

The case for Love is the tape and the trophy case. He won the 2025 Doak Walker Award as the nation's top running back — the first Notre Dame player ever to take it home — and finished third in the Heisman voting, a finalist behind Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza and Vanderbilt's Diego Pavia. He did not win the Heisman, but third in the country at a non-quarterback position is its own statement. His 2025 line read 1,372 rushing yards, fourth-best in the FBS, and 18 rushing touchdowns, third-best, across 12 games. The year before, he ran for 1,125 yards and 17 scores at roughly 6.9 yards a carry, set a school record with 13 straight games with a rushing touchdown, and ripped off a College Football Playoff-record 98-yard touchdown against Indiana.

What separates Love from the standard between-the-tackles profile is the receiving and the explosiveness. He caught 28 passes for 237 yards in 2024 and 27 for 280 in 2025, a three-down skill set that matters more than ever in an offense that throws to its backs on early downs. He totaled 40 rushing touchdowns over his final two seasons, described as the best two-year mark in the FBS, and helped carry Notre Dame to a national-championship-game appearance after the 2024 season. The traits that get a back drafted in the top five — speed, contact balance, hands, durability over a heavy workload — are all on the résumé.

The history puts the slot in perspective. Barkley at No. 2 in 2018 was the benchmark, and for years no team came close. Bijan Robinson broke a long top-10 drought at No. 8 to Atlanta in 2023, the first back taken in the top 10 since Barkley. Jahmyr Gibbs went No. 12 to Detroit that same year. Ashton Jeanty pushed the line back up to No. 6 with Las Vegas in 2025 and held the title of highest back since Barkley for exactly one draft cycle. Love at No. 3 now owns it outright. He is the first top-five running back since Barkley, and the gap between his slot and the recent norm is the entire story.

The position-value objection is not noise, and it deserves to be stated fairly. The analytics consensus — built over years of work from outlets like Football Outsiders and ESPN's Bill Barnwell — holds that pass plays return more expected value than runs, that running back production is more replaceable than any other premium position, and that backs break down fast under heavy workloads. Only about six running backs were taken in the entire first round across the five drafts preceding 2026, against 19 first-rounders in the six-draft stretch from 1992 through 1997. The market spoke, repeatedly, and it said do not do this. Arizona did it at No. 3.

The first back off the board in 2026 was Love, and the second was a teammate. Notre Dame's Jadarian Price went No. 32, the final pick of the first round, to Seattle — and because no running back was taken in the 29 picks between them, it marked the first time in draft history that the first two backs off the board came from the same school. The Notre Dame backfield pipeline, which has produced NFL contributors for a century, delivered both ends of the 2026 running back round one. Love was the headline; Price was the punctuation.

The verdict on the pick will be written in wins, not in spreadsheets. If Love becomes the centerpiece of an Arizona offense and the Cardinals contend, the $54 million looks like conviction and the analytics crowd looks like it confused a rule of thumb for a law. If his body breaks down under an NFL workload, or if the offense around him never materializes, the third pick in the draft becomes the case study every value-minded executive cites for the next decade. The talent is not in dispute — Doak Walker winners who finish third in the Heisman do not come along often. The question is the one the modern NFL has answered the same way for ten years, and that Arizona just answered differently.