Louisville Football: Offense Struggles again as Cards get handled by Virginia

New week, same story. Louisville football comes out flat on offense early and never really get anything going.

There’s no excuses anymore. This wasn’t Alabama, we weren’t playing in a monsoon, and we weren’t playing an in-state rival full of players that are motivated to make Louisville football pay for  passing on them. This was a manageable road game against a sub-par Virginia team, and Louisville continued to struggle mightily.

Louisville’s offense came out struggling once again. Couldn’t get any successful passing going, with just 32 passing yards at the half. Starting to sound like Groundhog Day? Louisville wasn’t able to establish any identity on offense for the entire game, getting shutout nearly the entire game if it wasn’t for a big interception return from Rodjay Burns, which ended up in a field goal despite Burns getting the ball inside the 10. No QB’s or RB’s were able to get into rhythm either with pedestrian numbers across the board.

The defense came to play today, holding Virginia to just 6 points at the half. Then things really started to unravel in the 4th quarter.  Virginia put up 14 in the 4th quarter with some big plays from dual-threat QB Bryce Perkins.

Bobby made the decision to go back to Puma in the second half and things didn’t get a whole lot better. Puma made some good throws, and put a little bit more life into the offense, but some of the same mistakes that have plagued this program repeatedly over the years came back to bite. False starts, drops, and the inability to run the ball consistently held back the offense for the entire game.

In the end, looking at the stats, Puma was solid. 10/19 for 113 yards in one half is not bad. But the Louisville offense needs to be better. Malik Cunningham was the leading rusher with 26 yards and he didn’t even play in the second half. Louisville’s receivers struggled once more with Dez Fitzpatrick being the only receiver to have more than 30 yards receiving with 62 yards receiving on 5 catches.

The Good: Rodjay Burns and Cornelius Strughill had themselves a nice game. Rodjay had a great pick and almost took it to the crib. Cornelius played one of his best games as well.

The Bad: Louisville was 3-11 on 3rd down and mustered only 214 total yards on offense. 148 yards passing. 66 rushing yards with only 2.3 yards per rush. 6 penalties. 2 interceptions and 1 fumble lost. Those are some pretty damning stats.

MVP: Cornelius Sturghill. He played arguably his best game of the season today. He was lock down and had a helluva pass deflection, he also logged 4 tackles.

Tweet of the day: 

This was a bright light in a dark day. Thank you, Coach Mack, and thank you David Johnson for staying home.

There’s nowhere to hide anymore for the football program. The Cards haven’t shown anything yet resembling the Louisville football that we have come to know and love. The team will return home next week to take on a team in a very similar position, Florida State.

Win and things begin to look up, maybe. Lose, and we could be staring down the barrel of a long, long losing streak.