Louisville Athletics: Ranking the Best Teams of the Last 10 Years

2) 2012-2013 Football

Highlights: Big East champions, 2013 Sugar Bowl Champions.

Sometimes, the best teams are not always the flashiest, nor the most talented.

This is the case with the 2012-13 Sugar Bowl Champion football team. This team actually went on to send double digit players to the NFL, but it wasn’t because there were a bunch of 4-star and 5-star players on the roster.

Louisville made it’s run to the Sugar Bowl on the backs of a consistent offense led by Teddy Bridgewater, and an outstanding defense.

It is often easy to forget that Louisville inexplicably dropped two games late in the season to Syracuse and UConn, because the Sugar Bowl win was such a game-changer for the program. But, don’t forget that Teddy Bridgewater played the final quarter of the season with basically one good arm and one good leg.

Bridgewater, still underappreciated nationally at the time, had some late-season heroics in a de facto Big East Championship game against Rutgers while hobbled by injury, and then played out of his mind in the Sugar Bowl.

The Cardinal defense was led by Preston Brown, Lorenzo Mauldin, and Calvin Pryor, among others, and was about as stingy and well-disciplined of a defense that Louisville has ever seen. Charlie Strong brought depth and continuity to a team that really went as far as their defense was going to take them.

That could not have been more the case than the very first play of the Sugar Bowl against No. 3 Florida, when the linebackers timed a pass perfectly and Terrell Floyd stepped in front of an errant pass for a pick 6. Quite possibly the most iconic play in Louisville football history.

So beautiful.

The 2013 Sugar Bowl champs were certainly not the most talented bunch, and didn’t have a crazily memorable regular season, but what a team they were. It is a true testament to the fact that it’s not the pieces, but how they mesh.