Life comes at you fast. A quick turnaround from 2-10 to 8-5 in Scott Satterfield’s 1st season with the Cardinals brought with it heightened expectations for Louisville in 2020. Thus far, this fall has been more of a nightmare for the Cardinals than climbing up the ACC power rankings.
They opened their season with a decent 2-touchdown win over Western Kentucky but have since dropped all 3 ACC games and currently sit in last place in the league heading into the weekend. Losing is one thing, but giving up 116 points in their last 3 games has their defense reeling. That includes a 19-point loss to Georgia Tech last weekend, the Yellow Jackets’ largest victory over a Power 5 program since October 25, 2018.
In this strange season, Louisville was 35th in SP+ going into last weekend and currently sit at 41st overall, their actual pre-season SP+ ranking as it so happens.
Louisville (+17) at Notre Dame
Notre Dame Stadium
South Bend, Indiana
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2020
Time: 2:30 PM ET
TV: NBC
Satterfield has to hope they can stop the bleeding on defense and look for more improvement–and live up to some of the hype–on the offensive side of the ball. The schedule will get a lot more friendly after this weekend’s matchup so a turn around with more momentum into November is likely. However, can the Cardinals keep it close in South Bend on Saturday?
Lousville’s Offense
Scott Satterfield is an OC Mind™ whose strength when he was hired was in the ability to turn around a moribund offense that fell to the 3rd worst scoring outfit among Power 5 programs the year after Heisman winner Lamar Jackson left town and Bobby Petrino decided not to coach anymore. Success was achieved in 2019 as Louisville jumped up to 30th nationally in scoring–and if you recall–caused a bunch of problems for the Irish in the first quarter of last year’s opener.
So, right now the best thing about Louisville is their offense, offense, and offense.
Somewhat surprisingly, their offense is ranked 12th at the moment by SP+ which may be heavily influenced by last year in their formula. The Cardinals have already faced two tough defenses in Miami (14th SP+) and Pittsburgh (12th SP+) and scored 54 points in those contests which is pretty good but not that impressive.
Compared to last year, they are averaging -0.81 yards per play.
It was expected that quarterback Malik Cunningham would make a jump in 2020 and it hasn’t happened yet. He was a raw passer who could run (972 rushing yards for 2018-19) but exploded last year with 11.5 YPA (would’ve led the nation if he qualified for enough attempts) with 22 passing touchdowns to just 5 interceptions.
Tutu is a problem.
Lousville’s offensive line was pretty bad at times last year and somehow they prevailed. It doesn’t look to be much better this year (14 sacks and 40 tackles for loss allowed already super yikes!) and that seems like a bad recipe for Cunningham who has doubled his pass attempts per game from a year ago and has already equaled last year’s 5 picks. In other words, they’ve moved away from being so run heavy and are putting more on their quarterback’s arm to extremely mixed reviews.
When Cunningham does connect it’s usually for big yardage as Louisville’s top 6 pass catchers are all averaging at least 11 yards per reception. Junior wideout Tutu Atwell is small (5’9″ 165 lbs.) but set the school record for receiving yardage last year–in addition to leading the entire ACC–and will be a major focus for the Irish secondary.
Redshirt sophomore tailback Javian Hawkins is also dynamic, coming off a school-record 1,525 rushing yards last year. There’s no doubt that outside of Clemson this is by far the most dangerous set of playmakers Notre Dame will face in the regular season.
Louisville’s Defense
Second-year defensive coordinator Bryan Brown is trying to rebuild ever-so-slowly from the ashes of Brian VanGorder. Last year, there was literally only one way to go but improvement which included chopping 10.7 points per game off their scoring average.
Unfortunately, they still sucked and gave up 33.4 points per game which was 110th nationally and dead-last in the ACC. Only with BVG is it possible to chop nearly 11 points off your scoring average and only move up from 128th to 110th in the national rankings.
This year, the progress has been perhaps a touch better but still pretty bad. They’re giving up 34.3 points per game, 6.19 yards per play, and are currently the 96th rated SP+ defense. Using that SP+ ranking this is the worst defense Notre Dame will face during the season.
Bryan Brown has put on a brave face.
In their base 3-4 defense, the linebackers are the primary playmakers. Five out of their top 6 tacklers right now come from the linebacker corps that has a 5th-year senior, 2 seniors, and 2 redshirt juniors all with starting experience. So far in 2020, they’ve combined for 99 tackles and 19 tackles for loss. In particular, senior ILB Dorian Etheridge (6’3″ 230 lbs.) is having a big year as he’s 2nd nationally with 8.5 tackles for loss through 4 games.
Stopping the big play will be crucial for Louisville. They are currently tied with TCU as the worst Power 5 defenses in allowing 30+ yard plays (12) from scrimmage and can’t seem the shake a 2+ year affliction of giving up massive yardage on any given play in hilarious fashion.
Prediction
This is one of the hardest games I’ve had to pick against the spread in quite some time. Last year in the opener we knew Louisville would be improved but they clearly overachieved against expectations. They even led the Irish 14-7 and gained 163 yards on their first 2 drives to send a shockwave of panic through Notre Dame nation before Clark Lea said enough and the Cards averaged 3.36 yards per play the rest of the game.
That game last year had Notre Dame favored by 20 points on the road ultimately with an 18-point victory. Louisville is supposed to be better again in 2020, hasn’t really proven that on the field yet, the advanced stats still love their offense, and the spread is (to me) a lot of points to look at with all the pandemic nonsense swirling around.
I can’t shake the thought that last week’s game against Florida State was kind of how this week’s game against Louisville was supposed to go. In other words, Notre Dame’s offense largely romps but the defense gives up several big plays in an overall high-scoring affair.
I’m curious to see how motivated Louisville will be coming off a terrible loss as 5-point road favorites last week. Their program has dealt with a lot of motivational swings in recent years and could either be depressed about their 1-3 record when they were a pre-season ACC darling or ready to turn things around quickly.
This game will be close if Clark Lea has back-to-back bad games (for his standards) which seems unlikely or if the Covid-19 outbreak continues to have lasting effects on the defensive depth and sharpness. Louisville has allowed an average of 37.7 points per game against Power 5 opponents since VanGorder left and a lot would have to go wrong for the Irish to struggle on offense.
I think we’ll serve up a fiftyburger this week. We were clearly trying to last week, and almost did, and this defense is worse. I suspect Kelly is going to spend a lot of this year trying to put up gaudy scores to cover for our weak schedule.
Agreed. I don’t think they’ll even need to pass it too much, it’ll just be like last week where the line blows ‘em off the ball and the talented backs rack up yards in space.
I feel better about a ND defensive bounce back than Eric. Covid protocols and recovery wrecked the secondary for last week. That’s better. Hamilton got a game back under his belt and will be better too, even though he wasn’t bad. Clark Lea usually keeps mobile QBs under wraps. And FSU was basically gifted 10 of their 26 points off of ND turnovers.
I’m going 49-14, 52-21 something like that. Louisville is very weak where ND is very strong and that’s bad, bad news for them.
Somewhat OT, but – for anyone who hangs out here but doesn’t know how to get into the gameday chat, here’s a brief post explaining it:
https://18stripes.com/2020-slack-gameday-chat/