For Louisville football, pink seat legacy lives on after remodel

The UofL Athletic Board approved funding for the long overdue refurbishing of the seats at Cardinal Stadium on Monday morning. However, the pink seats will live on forever through the fandom of Louisville football.

Today is big for Louisville football fans. On Monday morning Eric Crawford of WDRB and Jody Demling of Cardinal Authority confirmed that the University of Louisville Athletic Board’s finance committee approved the funding for the refurbishing of the once red, now pink seats inside of Cardinal Stadium.

It’s been a running joke for years that one day the faded seats would be replaced, or maybe not. Seats that started out red when the stadium opened in 1999 have seen the rise and fall and rise and fall of Louisville football.

Those seats hold memories of great moments, bad losses, up and coming coaches, the fall of others, and so much more.

While I am personally over the moon that my pink seats are being refurbished, I’ve often thought about how they tell a story that’s a perfect metaphor for the life of a Louisville Cardinal fan.

The pink seat symbolizes what Louisville Cardinals fandom is all about.

Louisville sports, for more than two decades, have been on the up and up. This has been a welcomed adjustment period between Louisville’s identity as a premier basketball school to national leaders in almost every conceivable college sport.

Prior to the ’90s, Louisville was a little-known commuter school in a city more well-known for bourbon and horse racing. However, the rise to the top has helped the school, city, and ever-expanding fan base gain notoriety and respect.

Still, this community of fans lives daily with a chip on their shoulder.

The city attracts coaches, student-athletes, and loyal supporters who bring a blue collar attitude. The still relatively newfound championship pedigree is one that belongs to this city, not just those who coached or played here. And we don’t take that lightly.

We wear that badge of honor and defy you to disrespect it. We are the new kids on the block; A program teetering on the edge of blue blood territory. And we don’t plan on letting up soon. We feel disrespected when associated with our neighbors to the east when held to a lower standard because of our mid-major upbringing, and, yes, when someone insults those damn pink seats. Because we remember when those same seats were red. When the Cardinal stadium field was green, and the 45,000 capacity seemed lofty.

We knew our Cards long before those days. To the metal bleachers and good old fashioned ass-kickings we often received in Old Cardinal Stadium.

We remember the hard days. But as those poorly conceived seats faded, we grew. We improved every year. Not just in football and basketball, but in baseball, women’s basketball, soccer, swimming, track and field, and everywhere in between. Those seats saw Floyd Street go from a ghost town to a mile stretch of beautiful, state of the art stadiums and arenas (and one god awful McDonald’s).

Though the pink seats will soon be replaced, I kind of like them in an odd way. Because, to an extent, they are a perfect representation of who we are.

What would otherwise be the most beautiful stadium in the country lacks a certain luster because of the unfortunate damage of the suns rays and thousands of spilled beers. And we like that.

Louisville will never be the prettiest. Louisville football will never have the true blue blood pedigree.

But those ugly seats are one of the small things that have kept that chip on our shoulder.

Come fall of 2019, Louisville football will restore their state of the art stadium to its original beauty. However, we won’t soon forget what those pink seats represent.