LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – A minute left, a tie game, the ball at midfield, and everything to play for. After this stinker of a game, in this stinging city, the Louisville football team still was a couple of decent pass plays from calling it a night.
A first down or two, a clean snap, a kick through the uprights. Everybody goes home, nobody gets hurt, you endure the Sunday video review then pretend it never happened.
Instead, No. 15-ranked Louisville walked face-first into a second overtime loss, and will need to brace for the talk that it is not a team ready for the word “playoff,” let alone the conversation around it..
Final score: California 29, Louisville 26, in overtime. The team from Berkeley flew across three time zones, got off the plane smelling like Biscoff cookies and airplane food, and still had enough left to throw for 350 yards, complete 16 passes to one guy, and walk out of L&N Stadium like it owned the place.
Louisville didn’t just fumble the bag, it lost the whole suitcase. On a night when Virginia’s luck finally ran out in an ACC loss to Wake Forest, the Cardinals threw the winning lottery ticket out with the table scraps – probably into double coverage.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but they had the game. They had the ball. They had the moment. And they turned it into a monument to hesitation, miscalculation, and whatever the opposite of situational awareness is.
The one thing you can’t do in such a situation is take a sack. Quarterback Miller Moss was sacked on the first play. The next three plays were the football equivalent of putting the ball in a paper bag, lighting it on fire, and ringing your own doorbell.
Now, look. It’s not the end of the world. The end of the world is a couple of miles away just past the airport.
But for all that is invested in this not-so-quasi professional football enterprise in Louisville, it is disappointing. And nobody sounded more disappointed than Cardinals’ coach Jeff Brohm. Actually, it wasn’t disappointment I heard in his voice after the game. It was disgust.
For mistakes that were made. For plays that didn’t get made. For reads that went unread. All of that, of course, falls at his feet. Which probably only made him more angry.
As angry as I’ve heard him after a loss.
“Just a lot of dumb penalties that have hurt us throughout the year just continue to happen,” Brohm said. “It’s just really dumb — like really dumb — some (calls) might be a little questionable, I understand. But just really dumb penalties. We’ve got to make better decisions.”
That’s four “dumbs” in there. But he wasn’t finished.
“You’ve got to stand in there and play tougher and make throws and make catches when your number is called and block when you’re supposed to. All those things,” he said. “We’ve got to coach better. Got to be tougher coaches. And if something’s not working, we’ve got to figure it out and get it fixed so that we can make it work. And we need to demand our players work hard to get it done.”
He’s on a roll. I’m not going to stop him.
“Defense. You know what? We let them throw all over us. One receiver just got open whenever he wanted to, no good plan to help cover him,” Brohm said. “We finally faced a good throwing quarterback, which I knew we would, and we will continue to as the season progresses. The next three games, we’re facing good-throwing quarterbacks, and we’re going to have to play better. And we had a chance, even at the end, to win, and you’ve got to be the tougher team and buckle down and just find a way to win. Just mental toughness, physical toughness, and we got to be tougher as coaches. All disappointing.”
Four dumbs, and five mentions of “toughness” if you’re scoring at home. And I know you are.
It can’t be overlooked. This was a week when Louisville needed to play cleaner, better, more grown-up football — the kind that closes the gap between good and great. Instead, it may have exposed a gap too wide to close.
The Cardinals have a short week before Clemson comes to town Friday. And they’ll have to find something between now and Friday night. Guts. Grit. A plan to cover the hot receiver. Preferably all of them. It has been a resilient group all year. But you wonder how long that will hold.
Because on Saturday, Louisville got beat by a team that came in with fewer wins and far fewer expectations. And somehow, they still looked more ready.
The Cardinals didn’t just lose. They missed their moment.
And the coach who came here to seize these moments knew it.
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