Louisville football: 3 locks and 3 bold predictions for Cards against WKU
By Jacob Lane
Lock – Louisville keeps Western Kentucky under 130 yards rushing
Like any team trying to bounce back from a disastrous season with a new coach, Louisville still has plenty to work on week-to-week. One area where they will have to show continued development is in the run defense department.
Through two weeks Louisville’s defense has given up a total of 230 and 130 rushing yards respectively to Notre Dame and Eastern Kentucky. While the numbers don’t pop out at you as red flags as they did last season (and even the year before), the Cards currently rank 102nd overall in the country in total run defense, allowing nearly 4.5 yards per play.
We know that the defensive line play and the overall defense of the Cardinals have improved big time in a short amount of time, but they’ll get a chance to make a real statement against Western Kentucky going up against Gaej Walker, who has had 100 yards rushing in both games this season.
If WKU is going to run the football like we’ve seen them do against Central Arkansas and FIU, they’ll have to do so early rather than later – as they are more likely to have to play catch up through the passing game at some point.
Knowing that Walker has been so dangerous this season, I 100 percent expect Brown and Dennison to design a game plan built around limiting his production. Which goes right along with the first lock of the Cards forcing an interception.
Walker has shown flashes of being a very productive back this season presenting a nice challenge to a defense hungry to continue proving people wrong.
Bold prediction: The Cards score on a special teams touchdown
During the offseason, we heard a lot of talk from Scott Satterfield about winning in all three phases of the game, including offense, defense, and special teams.
Stu Holt is the man tabbed with the responsibility of helping the Cards improve on special teams, an area that was battled constant mistakes and being underprepared during the Bobby Petrino era.
Holt has a nice talent of collection to work with this season (a group I ranked as the strongest on the team this offseason) and we’ve already seem bounds of improvements through two games.
Louisville has serious speed in the return game specifically with Rodjay Burns, Hassan Hall, and Tutu Atwell. Going up against Western Kentucky I think we’ll see that on full display.
On Saturday against EKU, we almost saw the first return of the season, when Tutu Atwell took the Colonel’s fourth punt of the night 33 yards and was just a few blocks away from going to the house.
Western has done a good job so far this season ensuring that they don’t give up any big gains punting or kicking the ball off, but something tells me this week that we’re going to see the specialists come up big.