Predicting the remainder of Louisville football’s 2019 season
@ North Carolina State
ESPN FPI Prediction: 52.3 percent chance
Louisville’s next game is in Raleigh, North Carolina against the North Carolina State Wolfpack. When you look at NC State this year, the one thing the standouts is their schedule. They played just two games in the month of October and will play five games in 28 days in November. This is the biggest stretch of the season for them and at 4-3, they still find themselves looking for six wins.
NC State’s results are exactly what you’d expect, they’ve beaten teams they’re supposed to beat and lost to teams they’re supposed to lose to, for the most part. The one outlier was the 17 point loss at West Virginia, who’s had a very down season. NC State has shown the repercussions of losing Ryan Finley, and a variety of weapons on both sides of the ball as well as members of their staff like Dwayne Ledford and Eli Drinkowitz.
But they’ve beaten Syracuse and that’s it in the ACC. Boston College just won at their place 45-24 and Florida State defeated them 31-13 earlier this year.
We’ve seen the differences from last year to this year with this Louisville team, this is perhaps the greatest opportunity to exemplify that. Louisville will have a firm understanding of the NC State game plan thanks to Ledford, and I expect the offense to be able to work magic against the nation’s 41st best defense. While the defense should be able to contain quarterback Matthew McKay and the limited NC State offense.
NC State might have beaten Louisville 52-10 last year in a demoralizing home loss, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that things are much much different now. I think Louisville gets it done here to move to 7-3.