With the college football season in full swing, dynasty owners are finally receiving meaningful updates about the 2026 draft class, informing everything from rebuilding teams’ long-term plans to the values of draft picks being dealt for impact players.
Since I already didn’t need much of an excuse to get hyped for the most wonderful time of the year, #DraftSzn, it’s officially time to crack open the All-22 and figure out just how excited we should be for each prospect in the 2026 draft class.
Whether you’re the owner of a rebuilding team dreaming on the future studs that will populate your roster in six months, or simply an active trader hoping to better understand the values of your 2026 picks, it’s never too early to study the next batch of prospects.
Where better to start than with the presumed 1.01 of this draft class, Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love. Today, we’re going to break down how exactly Love projects to score fantasy points, where he needs to improve, and how he compares to other running backs to go 1.01 in recent history.
As I did last year, I’ll be filling out a player card for quick reference. Note that the template below highlights how important I consider each trait to be. For the player’s card, the highlighting will represent how good I consider them to be in each skill.
Background
Measurements
6’0 214 lbs per ESPN.
Stats
Via SportsReference as of October 15, 2025.
Fantasy-Relevant Traits
Goal Line
This area might always be a thorn in the side of Jeremiyah Love owners. While Love is used frequently at the goal line in college, including as a wildcat quarterback at times, he just doesn’t quite have the size to punch the ball in when he’s contacted by a defensive lineman.
While Love is listed at 215 lbs, he has a very lean build, in part because he’s decently tall by the standards of lighter running backs, and in part because his listed weight is likely inflated. We’ll probably never get an answer to this because my best guess is Love doesn’t test at the combine, opting instead to pack on the water weight so as to weigh in at the world’s fakest 220 lbs.
Between having a slightly high center of gravity and a lean build, Love simply does not project as a goal line back. Even if he becomes a star player, he feels likely to share goal line work with a bowling ball in pads. On film, he was stuffed too frequently in short yardage situations for me to be comfortable projecting him to a goal line role.
Pass Catching
While Love is called upon to catch passes with decent regularity, this is an under-utilized part of his game at Notre Dame. While many running backs can amass gaudy reception totals on screen passes and checkdowns, Love distinguishes himself by running downfield routes.
Downfield routes can result in chunk plays for running backs, allowing them to accumulate points faster than by being a PPR scam.
Unlike most running backs who don’t bring any route-running nuance to the table, Love actually seems to have some solid fundamentals in this area. He is very intentional about getting into this stem with speed and without giving away the timing of his cut, and then is much more crisp in his breaks and explosive out of his breaks than you’d expect from a running back.
Notre Dame has used Love as a pass catcher from a variety of alignments, including out of the slot, on wheel routes, and by releasing out of the backfield into the short middle. If Love ends up with a creative playcaller who values this aspect of his game, he could easily be one of the most productive pass-catching backs in the league.
Notably, I saw very few screens run for Love, which felt puzzling given how explosive he is. To be fair, he wasn’t a huge tackle-breaker after the catch, struggling to make the first man miss because his feet are stopped when he’s catching the ball behind the line of scrimmage.
Love is primarily a hands-catcher and fairly reliable, and on one occasion I saw him bring in a one-handed highlight reel catch on a wheel route for a touchdown.
Elusiveness
For a slim, speedy star running back, you might expect a human joystick type of player who makes the first man miss with regularity. In practice, Love gets it done with speed and explosiveness more often than he does with pure elusiveness. That isn’t to say he isn’t elusive, but his ability to make a man miss does not separate him from his peers nearly as much as his angle-erasing speed and explosiveness do.
Love does have a solid juke move, although he lacks a nasty jump cut to really change the complexion of a play. He can also execute a nasty spin move on occasion, and the results are highlight-worthy when this lands.
Additionally, he loves to hurdle defenders and can break a big play when he picks his spot correctly. However, he’s also just as likely to hurdle in a crowd and not really get anywhere.
As for why I don’t give Love a higher grade for elusiveness, he’s missing a couple of the skills common to the players who really shine in this area. First of all, he doesn’t cut at full speed quite as well as some of the elite backs of his archetype. Consider how Jahmyr Gibbs can adjust his angle at a full sprint without missing a beat.
Secondly, he doesn’t maintain his balance after making a move. Many of the most elusive players in the league not only can make a man miss, but they also remain balanced without losing speed, able to burst into the open field or shrug off secondary contact to continue their run.
Love’s footwork currently prevents him from getting to that level. He sometimes dances before making a move, losing all his speed, which means that even if he makes the first man miss, other defenders have an easy time swarming to him. Additionally, his moves are very all-or-nothing. After he spins, jumps, or cuts, he’s frequently off balance, resulting in stumbles or even easy arm tackles.
Love does show solid contact balance and even a nasty stiff arm when he gets to lower his shoulder in the open field and initiate contact, but he tends to lose high-speed collisions picking through traffic around the line of scrimmage. This is the main separator between him and an Ashton Jeanty type.
Don’t get me wrong, good-not-great elusiveness to go along with plus-plus explosiveness and good receiving skills is a very enticing package.
Explosive Play Ability
Not only is this Love’s bread and butter, but I would go so far as to say Love will be one of the most explosive backs in the entire NFL the moment he takes the field. Just watch this 98-yard touchdown run from last season.
Love has true angle-erasing acceleration to turn the corner and make house calls, and he accelerates through clean holes in the line of scrimmage extremely well.
This explosive play ability will be crucial for fantasy, especially to overcome any lost goal line opportunities he has to share with another back. There just aren’t many running backs in the NFL who pull away from pursuing defensive backs at the second level.
While I talked at length about why I don’t consider Jeremiyah Love overly elusive by my very narrow definition of elusiveness, he absolutely can make a tackler miss by erasing his pursuit angles. Combined with his pass-catching ability, Love has many avenues to scoring fantasy points in chunks. He just needs to earn enough of the down-to-down work to have a solid floor.
Traits That Matter for Earning a Role
Ball Security
Love has not lost a fumble in his college career, only putting a single ball on the ground this year and not once last year.
Early Down Rushing
This is the area of Love’s game that has evolved the fastest between the 2024 and 2025 seasons, and we’ll need to revisit this evaluation at the end of the season to see where he ends up.
In 2024, Love was patient nearly to a fault. On the one hand, the patience was a good thing in terms of his willingness to let blocks develop. He would consistently stick close to his blockers, waiting for them to engage defenders before exploding past the outsides of their shoulders.
However, this sometimes worked against Love, in that he would be moving at low speed while picking through traffic, which made it hard for him to burst through arm tackles. He also did not have the best balance or strength working his way through the line of scrimmage.
This year, Love has shown flashes of a more decisive and violent one-cut style. Using his speed to his advantage, he’s been planting his foot and exploding through the hole, which has resulted in getting through creases and into the second level more frequently. It’s also a higher variance approach, as it can sometimes mean he commits before the block has developed.
While Love’s decision-making and approach to early down rushing has evolved rapidly over the last year, the one constant is that the play strength and balance just aren’t at the necessary level yet to be a good inside rusher.
Love could go two ways here. On the one hand, he could be the type of speed back who never earns an early down role, and who can’t keep the offense on schedule when he does have to run inside. However, he could just as easily develop into a star player who is just reliable enough rushing inside to keep defenses honest.
After the college football season ends, I will absolutely be revisiting Love’s tape to see how he progresses in this area.
Pass Blocking
Your guess is as good as mine. Notre Dame almost exclusively had Love release into the flat or into the short middle of the field, and almost never left him in to pass block.
I saw exactly one case where Love needed to pick up a blitzer. While the fundamentals in terms of landing a punch weren’t really there, he actually moved his feet extremely well to keep the rusher between him and his quarterback. There was some serious “want to” in that one-play sample.
Short Yardage
Similar to his goal line work, Love was stuffed with some regularity. You could argue Notre Dame didn’t put him in great spots, telegraphing their intentions and allowing too many defenders in the box, but with Love’s lean build, it’s hard to imagine this ever being a strength of his game.
Profile
Jeremiyah Love profiles as one of the premier speed backs in the NFL, ideally with a robust amount of receiving work.
He does not quite have the 20-touch workhorse profile of former 1.01 dynasty rookie picks such as Ashton Jeanty and Bijan Robinson, so his situation and coaching will matter a lot more than for the truly rare bellcow backs.
However, with projected mid-late first round draft capital, Love will likely have the buy-in from his future coaching staff to be an important part of the offense. Assuming first round draft capital, he should be a top-3 pick in dynasty rookie drafts, depending on how the quarterback class shakes out in Superflex leagues.
First round running backs are great dynasty assets, and they’re safer than any other type of dynasty rookie draft pick.
Best Case
Similar to a James Cook career arc, Love begins his career as an efficient rusher with decent receiving work but heavily sharing short yardage and goal line duties. As his career progresses, he could earn more trust around the goal line and consolidate a high snap share.
To me, Love’s best case scenario tops out more as a middle-end RB1 than a true league-winning asset, owing primarily to the lack of elite balance or ideal size. However, the NFL is rapidly evolving with elite players throwing traditional archetypes out the window and instead dictating where and how they win. Love controls his own destiny in this regard.
Worse Case
Love doesn’t consolidate a high enough snap share to break big plays in most games, and cannot overcome being tied to bad teams or offensive lines. He doesn’t get to run many routes because he isn’t trusted in pass protection, and is lacking too much play strength to break out of either of these ruts.
With good draft capital, this type of player is still a useful asset, just a disappointing one for a 1.01 type of pick.