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The Louisville Cardinals aren’t “back.”
They will be “back” when they win nine or 10 games in a regular season and play in high-profile bowl games, as they did in Bobby Petrino’s two separate stints as UL’s head coach.
The Cardinals aren’t “back” as a top-tier force in college football, in much the same way that Michigan and Texas aren’t “back.” The Longhorns are close to being back, but LSU and Oklahoma showed they aren’t quite there yet. Michigan is much farther removed from being “back” under Jim Harbaugh.
No, Louisville isn’t “back,” but the Cardinals are no longer irrelevant or off the radar. They matter again… and their period of exile wasn’t very long.
Louisville is preparing for big, bad Clemson and then ACC Coastal favorite Virginia. The Clemson game could be an important learning experience for a young team which is trying to understand what it takes to be great. The Virginia game is a lot more winnable, and will be a more legitimate test of the Cardinals’ abilities.
These two games give Louisville a chance to continue to elevate its national profile. That in itself is a blessing for the program. Yet, don’t allow yourself to be limited or confined to the notion that what Louisville does this season is a 2019 story.
To be sure, Louisville making a bowl game in 2019 would be a tremendous achievement and a sign of the program’s ability to quickly recover. Yet, mere “recovery” is a short-term aspiration. Restoration — re-creating a program at a high level of success — is the bigger long-term goal for Scott Satterfield.
That, in short, points to the ultimate significance of Louisville’s quick revival, manifested by wins over Boston College and especially Wake Forest.
Anyone and everyone in college football can see that the ACC is Clemson and 13 Other Teams. Virginia’s and Wake Forest’s losses in Week 7 underscore the point that there is no clear-cut OR strong No. 2 team in the conference. I doubt that Louisville will be that team this year, though if it takes down Virginia, it would be able to make a reasonable case.
The more important point: Louisville’s 2019 has set up the program to make a legitimate run at being the ACC’s second-best team in 2020.
The ACC isn’t the only conference to feature this next dynamic, but it offers two very prominent examples of it: Coaches who were regarded as hot commodities have lost their fastballs.
We are seeing it across the country with Harbaugh at Michigan and Mike Gundy at Oklahoma State, also David Shaw at Stanford and Kevin Sumlin at Arizona. The ACC, though, is very much a part of the same pattern, with Willie Taggart of Florida State and Justin Fuente of Virginia Tech mysteriously losing their winning edge after several years of high-quality work in the coaching profession at previous schools (and in Fuente’s case, his first season in Blacksburg in 2016).
The proliferation of high-profile coaches failing to live up to expectations creates a huge vacuum in the second tier of college football’s power structure, below the elites who keep cranking out elite seasons or (in LSU’s case under Ed Orgeron) have recently rejoined the elites after a few years away from the limelight.
Louisville’s 2019 season contains plenty of meaning for this year, chiefly in relationship to a possible bowl bid. The bigger story of this 2019 revival, though, is that it raises Louisville’s ceiling for 2020 and beyond. If UL hits the jackpot with Scott Satterfield — and the former Appalachian State boss turns out to be the home run the Cardinals hoped he would become – the Cards could be in position to deck the non-Clemson ACC for several years.
That is the truly exciting possibility to consider in Louisville.
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