Alex Kirshner: Why I'm in on Louisville when college football comes back

Hi there. I’m Alex Kirshner. Thanks to Tyler and the team for having me here.

I’ve worked for a long time around SB Nation, where I’m now on a three-month furlough from my job at Banner Society. Along with my colleagues Spencer Hall, Jason Kirk, Richard Johnson, and Tyson Whiting, I’m publishing an ebook later this summer about the formation of college sports after World War II and how the NCAA tried to get control of it all.

It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction in the style of a sci-fi Western, and it’ll talk a lot about how Kentucky lost Bear Bryant and why it’s UK’s fault the NCAA exists as it does today. If that sounds fun to you, we’d love for you to preorder the book. It costs 99 cents or whatever you want to pay, and 20% of the profits go to Feeding America. Here’s that link again.

OK. Let’s talk about Louisville.

When Louisville hired Scott Satterfield in early December 2018, he was a fallback pick. Very few coaching candidates are so explicitly tied to one school as Jeff Brohm was to Louisville in the back half of 2018, when his Purdue team had thrashed Ohio State in primetime on ABC and made it to a second bowl in two years after a decade of being a doormat.

But when U of L inked a deal with Satterfield, a few things immediately jumped out to me (and I wrote about them at the time) as encouraging signs. Satterfield was a backup hire, but he was a smart backup hire, and there wasn’t much reason to see him as any lesser a pick than Brohm would’ve been. What Satterfield lacked in Louisville ties, he made up for in other areas.

The first thing that jumped out about Satterfield was what a master he was of the short-term buildup. Satterfield’s teams at Appalachian State were exceptionally well organized and in good enough shape to play against opponents with deeper rosters. An FCS power for decades, App jumped to FBS in 2014, which is supposed to mean pain for a few years. The other teams that made that move in the 2010s went 5-7 in their first year, on average, with just one beating .500.

But Satterfield’s 2014 App team had the most efficient defense and second-most efficient offense in the Sun Belt, despite having a true freshman QB and scaling up from FCS’ 63 scholarships to FBS’ 85 on a quick time frame. The depth issues that should’ve pounded a team in App’s position didn’t shine through, and Satterfield laid the foundation for what became a four-year run of Sun Belt dominance, which he parlayed into the Louisville gig.

You’re reading this website, so you know Satterfield’s Year 1 magic held true at Louisville in 2019. He didn’t even need to load up on JUCO transfers or luck into an all-world quarterback, two of the most popular routes for first-year coaches to take their teams from horrible to good. Louisville’s defense was basically the same in 2019 as the year before (100th in SP+ instead of 99th), but the offense moved from 102nd to 29th in the first year of Satterfield’s reign.

College football doesn’t really know how to do Coach of the Year awards. There are a bunch of them, and national media types like me have never settled on the right criteria to name the best coach in college football in a given year. Ed Orgeron cleaned up most of those awards in 2019, which makes sense. Hard to argue with honoring the guy who didn’t lose any games!

But, again, because you’re reading this website, you know Satterfield’s first-year performance was worthy of more than ACC COY honor. You know what a shambolic mess Louisville was at the end of 2018 and how shockingly competent the team was in 2019. It’s a long road from “giving up a touchdown to Clemson’s holder, who is also Dabo Swinney’s son, to go down 77-16 in the fourth quarter” to going 8-5 and looking pretty solid in one year’s time.

If we graded every coach’s 2019 season on a pound-for-pound basis, it’s hard to see how Satterfield wouldn’t be #1, given the mess he inherited. Whether you believed recruiting rankings (which had Louisville as a slightly below-average Power 5 roster at the end of 2018) or certain scouts (who told my SB Nation colleagues Louisville had one of the worst P5 rosters they’d ever seen), it was a hell of an impressive lift to get so much out of this team in Year 1.

What might be next

I am bullish about the prospects for Louisville in 2020 and beyond, for three reasons.

The first is the simplest: the non-Clemson ACC is wide open. It’ll take a lot of luck for anybody in the Atlantic to do anything about Clemson for a long time, and I’m not here to pump you up with expectations of a division championship in the next few years.

But I am here to point out that, after the Tigers, nobody’s better positioned to rack up wins in this division for the next few seasons. Mike Norvell’s Florida State might get there and has built-in recruiting advantages, but FSU also has a ton of building left to do and has to deal with some restrictions brought on by the program’s poor APR scores in recent years. If Louisville gets on anything like Satterfield’s App State trajectory, the program could find a nice soft spot and win a bunch of games the next couple seasons. A non-Playoff New Year’s Six bowl slot is very attainable.

The next thing: I’m excited to see what Satterfield can do on offense with anything approaching a talent advantage on the teams he’s playing against. He didn’t really have that at App State, where his classes slotted around the middle of the Sun Belt. He just built good offenses by recruiting fast (not particularly big) players and scheming up ways for them to run. (His former assistant and current head coach Shawn Clark explained the App model to me on Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody earlier this spring, if you’re interested in how the Mountaineers build.)

In 2019, Satterfield schemed up nicely to make Louisville’s offense a ton better. It helped to have an all-time physical stud like Mekhi Becton slotting in right away at tackle, but I’m convinced a lot of Louisville’s growth came down to Satterfield’s staff putting Bobby Petrino’s old players in better positions and letting them do their thing.

At the end of the Petrino era, U of L was a mess and couldn’t line up for basic run plays to get five or six yards. In the first weeks of the Satterfield era – again, using mostly the same players or true freshmen – Louisville was just solid. The front didn’t spring a lot of leaks, and even without a transcendent running threat at QB, Louisville was able to build one of the most explosive offenses in the country. It’s not that hard when you can hold zone blocks and let a player like Javian Hawkins run around for a while. There’s nothing special about this call, for instance:

But Satterfield’s a schemer at heart, and he felt comfortable trying some creative things in his first year, too. As my colleague Richard Johnson notes about one of them:

Satterfield’s probably not going to recruit much better than middling ACC classes at Louisville, based on the rankings. But his creativity and emphasis on speed in his recruiting philosophy are going to make a lot of three-ish-star players look like four-stars, and Louisville fans should be excited about Micale Cunningham and his friends getting more time in Satterfield’s system.

It would’ve been entirely understandable if the 2019 Louisville offense was a dumpster fire while Satterfield got things organized. That it didn’t is a good sign.

The other big reason for optimism, in my view, is that Louisville’s defense will probably never be as bad again under Satterfield as it was in his first year. Bryan Brown’s an extremely well regarded coordinator who drew rave reviews for his work under Satterfield at App, where he was promoted to the coordinator job in 2018. That year, the Mountaineers finished 20th in Defensive SP+, up from 46th the year before. When Louisville hired Satterfield, his bringing along Brown was one of the biggest causes to feel good about this entire operation.

I’m a little surprised Louisville didn’t improve on defense in 2019, but remember everything I said about how the offense could’ve been a dumpster fire and that would’ve been OK? That still holds for the defense, which was more or less nonexistent in Petrino’s last season.

Brown’s defenses at App State, both as coordinator and cornerbacks coach, were consistently good and sometimes excellent. They clamped down well on both the run and the pass, allowing occasional decent gains but choking off almost all forms of explosive play. It’s harder to do that in a league with lots of solid downfield passers, but the ACC still isn’t really that league.

All of that’s to say: It wouldn’t be surprising if Louisville’s top-30 offense got a ways better over the next year or two. But it would be highly surprising if the #100 defense didn’t improve a lot.

Anyway, thanks for letting me stop by.

I think Louisville has the brightest future of any of the Not Clemson teams in the ACC Atlantic. Every year, I adopt a team or two that I use to annoy my friends by insisting I was one of the first people to think they might be good. You all beat me on 2020 Louisville, I’m sure, but I look forward to joining you on the bandwagon and hope we can safely watch college football soon.