Satterfield's Hatred of "Sloppiness" a Welcome Guest at Louisville
With kickoff rapidly approaching, fans, coaches, and talking heads alike are beginning to narrow their sights on what’s ahead. Gone are the days of the offseason where we’re breaking down games off in the distance like Syracuse in November. Instead, our focus has shifted to Notre Dame. Along with this tunnel vision comes the extreme attention to details. Coach Satterfield talked about it on Monday where he touched on how, especially in the early part of the season, teams make a lot of mistakes, and that Louisville is trying to limit as many of those mistakes as possible.
Satterfield even went as far to mention the Florida-Miami game this past weekend with the bevy mistakes and “sloppiness” we saw when it came to basic things tackling and pre-snap penalties. Regarding the first game of the season, Satterfield said, “You don’t look as sharp as you’d like to look. And as a coach that’s always something that you’re shaking your head at with the false start penalties…That’s the one thing that we’re trying to harp on so we can play a clean game…It’s huge.”
Unfortunately, Louisville fans know this all too well. How can anyone forget the 2017 season opener against Purdue where Louisville had ten (10!) false start penalties? Little things like limiting false starts are what great coaching staffs take pride in and separate good teams from great teams. In UofL’s case, this season, ticky-tack things like pre-snap errors can be the difference between winning 2-3 games or flirting with bowl eligibility.
So, if great staffs are experts when it comes to details, do Satterfield and Co. fall into that category?
According to ESPN, after joining the FBS in 2014, App State’s total penalties committed decreased considerably each season for their first three years. In 2014 the Mountaineers ranked 27th overall in total penalties committed (88), then 43rd (84) in ‘15, and then 56th (79) in’16. Louisville, on the other hand, ranked 25th (90), 12th (97), and 5th (101) over the same time frame. As App State’s discipline improved, Louisville’s deteriorated.
However, App State did have a lousy 2017 season where they ranked 21st with 91 penalties committed. They improved last year, though, ranking 44th with 83 penalties. While App State committed fewer penalties than Louisville in every year except for 2017, these numbers still aren’t eye-popping, nor are they terribly encouraging.
But this got me thinking about how there are a lot of things that are out of a coach’s control when it comes to penalties like personal fouls. This made me decide to look into the penalties that Satterfield stresses the most and has the most ability to coach-up and somewhat control: False Starts.
Much to my chagrin, I could not find any database that tracks the numbers for each individual penalty. So because I hate myself, I combed through every game and penalty that Louisville has had in the last three years, as well as Dwayne Ledford’s three seasons at NCST, and the two FBS seasons Satterfield and Ledford were on staff together at App State, scouring for false start penalties. What I found was nothing short of arousing.
The bad news is that in the last three years Louisville has committed 81 false start penalties, highlighted by the 2016 Houston and 2017 Purdue debacles. But you already knew that.
The good news is that even if you combine Ledford’s last three seasons at NCST and his two FBS seasons with Satterfield at App, his o-lines only had 66 false starts over those FIVE seasons.
It gets better. While Ledford and Satterfield didn’t have the greatest false start totals at App together, the numbers did improve from 24 false starts in 2013 to 16 in 2014. Once Ledford left for NCST in 2016 his o-lines never had more than 15 false starts in a season. During the same timeframe Louisville didn’t have a season with fewer than 24 false start penalties, with 2017 being by far the worst with 33 false start penalties.
That’s especially impressive when you consider that NCST’s offense ranked in the Top 25 in plays-per-game the last two seasons. But if that doesn’t turn you on, this will: In the 39 games Ledford coached at NCST, 27 of them had one or fewer false start penalties committed by the Wolfpack.
If Satterfield, Ledford, and the rest of the staff can instill this high level of discipline early, then more and more little things will start to fall in Louisville’s favor which could snowball into big plays and big wins. I have little doubt that they’ll be able to do so as NCST’s and App State’s o-lines committed a total of 10 false starts across their last 6 season openers, to Louisville’s 13 in their last three.
Louisville is going to be over matched in a lot of their games this season. This makes the attention to detail ever so critical. But I believe we have the right staff and pieces in place to capitalize on even the smallest of details. Because at the end of the day football is a game of inches. And as Al Pacino once said, “when we add up all those inches that's going to make the f***ing difference between WINNING and LOSING.”