Mailbag week is one of my favorite weeks, because it's the closest thing sports writing has to a barstool. Somebody asks about a running back's health and forty minutes later you're arguing about whether Josh Sweat reminds you more of a young Chad Brown or a poor man's Robert Mathis. A new Cardinals mailbag over at Yahoo Sports hit all the notes Arizona fans are chewing on right now, so I'll work through the big three.

First, Jeremiyah Love. His recovery is the story that matters most in that building, and not just for this season. History is unkind to teams that rush backs back from leg injuries; the cautionary tale everybody remembers is Saquon Barkley's 2020 ACL tear, which cost him basically the entire season and dimmed the explosion that made him the second pick in the draft. The mailbag suggests Love is moving in the right direction, and if that's true, the Cardinals should still resist the urge to hurry him. A fresher Love in November is worth more than a limited Love in September, and no coach needs a spreadsheet to tell him that.

Then there's the Josh Sweat chatter. The mailbag flags trade talk around his name, though it doesn't say who's driving it, whether other teams are calling Arizona or the other way around, and I'd be careful reading much into that until something concrete surfaces. But any time a pass rusher's name surfaces this early, my antenna goes up, because edge help is the one commodity every contender thinks it needs and half of them are wrong. Sweat has shown he can win his matchups when the guys around him are winning theirs, and if the phone is genuinely ringing in Tempe, it tells you the rest of the league thinks Arizona's defensive front has become worth raiding. Windows in the NFC West don't stay open long.

And finally the question marks, which is really the whole season in one word. The Cardinals have the quarterback, they have the skill talent, and what they've lacked, in my eyes, is the nasty up front on both sides of the ball. I've always believed Kyler Murray is at his best when the pocket is clean and the run game lets him lean on play action, and defenses are at their best when somebody besides the secondary decides the line of scrimmage belongs to them. Everything else, the schematic stuff, the rotation questions, the special teams fine print, that's window dressing. Games are won where the big men fight.

I said something similar in my season betting guide last week: the teams everybody's sleeping on are usually the teams with unresolved answers at the line of scrimmage, and the teams everybody loves are usually the ones who already settled those questions. Arizona, to me, is still in the first group. Whether they graduate to the second depends on Love's health and whether that edge rotation gets stronger or thinner between now and the deadline.

So keep an eye on the transaction wire this month. Front offices lie in August and tell the truth in September, and the Sweat talk, one way or the other, will tell us exactly what the Cardinals think they are. My money says they know they're close. Close and finished are two different animals, though, and football has a long memory for teams that confuse the two.