Louisville football: 3 takeaways from the 2020 schedule announcement

The first half of the season lends to racking up wins and firm ACC footing

Opening the season with back-to-back conference games could potentially have huge implications for Louisville. Let’s start with North Carolina State, who we now know will be Louisville’s season opener on Thursday, September 3rd.

In 2019, Louisville bounced back against North Carolina State in a big way following their blow out loss the year before. The Wolfpack were a shell of the teams that Dave Doeren had coached in years past and it led to a big win for Louisville and really became another momentum-shifting win.

NC State likely won’t be a team expected to do much more than get to a bowl game and with a lot of the same issues that they had with stopping Louisville’s offense should be prevalent once again which could lead to a huge day for Micale Cunningham and company.

Starting the season 1-0 overall and in the conference will be huge but it’s the following week’s matchup against Clemson which could be a tone-setter for the season. AS many people have pointed out on Twitter, getting Clemson early rather than later is a very big positive for the 2019 season.

Clemson returns two extremely important pieces in Trevor Lawrence, who should be the odds on favorite to win the Heisman Trophy and running back Travis Etienne, who decided to return to college for one more season for another chance at a national title. This is a game that I fully expect the Cards to lose considering how good the Tigers were last season and will be again next year – but it is one that could be an early trap game.

Last season we saw Clemson methodically get through their first several games, including a sleepy 24-10 victory and a near heartbreaking upset to North Carolina on a 2-pt. conversion. They have shown in other years as well that they have a tendency to coast (at times) through the early part of the season, which means that Scott Satterfield and the Cards can at least potentially catch the Tigers slipping and if not give them one hell of a fight.

I expect Louisville to lose that game, as I said, going into back-to-back buy games with a chance to get up to 3-1 overall before heading into two more games against mid-to-bottom tier ACC schools in Syracuse and Boston College, both on the road. That means that should the Cards start the season 5-1, which we all expect them to, that they would do so with three conference wins to only one loss. That would give them every opportunity to finish second in the ACC Atlantic and compete to be the conference’s second-best team.

Starting fast and building confidence will be key heading into the second half of the season.