Louisville football recruiting strategy: Defense, defense, and more defense

Louisville football’s staff has retooled the defense through recruiting.

Cleaning up for former Louisville football coach Bobby Petrino is like cleaning up after my 2-year old daughter. She knows the mess she’s leaving behind and often times she looks at it and then back at me with the “you gonna get that?” face before I ultimately have to pick it up. Over time she’s learned no matter how big the mess is, someone else that’s not her will clean it up if she just simply ignores that it happened.

See the similarities?

It didn’t take long for Scott Satterfield and new defensive coordinator Bryan Brown to realize they inherited a “Kevin’s Chili” sized mess when it came to the state of the Louisville football program. There were no shortage of major issues that had to be torn down and completely rebuilt, nothing more so apparent than the culture, but as the layers were peeled back more and more, it was the roster that became the biggest issue.

Satterfield was officially named head coach of the program on December 4, 2018, and had less than two weeks to hire some sort of staff and put together something that resembled a recruiting class. Over the coming weeks, we began to quickly see where the biggest problems existed, and unfortunately for everyone involved, they mostly fell on the side of the ball where Louisville was coming off one of the worst seasons in power five history; defense.

Bryan Brown put it this way:

“We didn’t really know what expectations to have, coming off a 2-10 season.  When we first got here, a lot of the media told me this was the worst defense in college football history, so when you take over a defense that gave up a lot of points and was at the very, very bottom statistically, you didn’t really know what to expect.”

How Louisville football’s defense got cleaned up

See the former staff, at least what was left at the very end, didn’t seem to worry too much about roster makeup. Instead of having depth in all the places that really mattered like the offensive line, defensive line, secondary, special teams, Louisville’s roster was filled with skill position players. Running backs, wide receivers, quarterbacks, were there on the roster, and we’ve seen since the fruits of that, but in the positions mentioned the Cards were set up for failure and it was going to take a long time to rebuild.

Here we are nearly a year and a half later with two classes in the books and the Cards are prepared to begin playing their recruits on defense for the first time. Last year we saw a glimpse of how the defense can be impacted by a newcomer, as JUCO linebacker Monty Montgomery developed into a solid role player and playmaker, while his counterparts mostly were relegated to special teams and redshirts.

In fact, this season as many as 17 total players from the classes of 2019 and 2020 could see the field on the defensive side of the ball as the depth issues that all of the coaching staff have talked about will begin to subside. That will include the four defensive players from the class of ’19 and the 13 newly signed recruits from ’20.

The lopsided roster issues haven’t been solved just yet as even Brown acknowledged it would time to get things back to where the staff felt comfortable. However, you have to feel comfortable with where things are headed, including with the class of 2021, which could be one of the best classes in program history.

After the commitment of Rance Conner Jr., the Louisville football program now holds commitments from a total of 10 players, giving them the sixth-best class in the ACC and 29th best overall. As you might imagine, the staff has once again prioritized defense.

Of those 10 commitments, seven of them are from players on the defensive side of the ball headlined by four-star safety Benjamin Perry and defensive end Victoine Brown. Both players have the game-changing ability and could be instant impact players when they step on the field.

Former Cardinal Eric Wood spoke with Mark Ennis of 93.9 The Ville earlier this year and spoke specifically about depth. He summarized that depth isn’t an issue that can be fixed overnight, especially having nearly 15-20 players transfer last offseason. It will take time to get the defense where it needs to be in order to fit the scheme that Brown deploys and have the depth needed to compete against the Clemson’s of the world.

The coaching we saw last year demonstrated the ability to design and implement a plan based on the talent on the roster. While Louisville had starters and few role players who could make game-winning plays, what came behind them wasn’t quite capable of doing the same.

This year, that should begin to change as players see the field for the first time and the defense Brown envisions having, becomes reality. Speaking on that exactly, Brown told local media:

“We’re going to stick with our scheme and we’ll have some adjustments to it. We weren’t able to do a whole lot of our scheme that we had at App State last year because it was the first year. This year we will be able to dig in the bag a little bit deeper and get some more stuff that we were able to use and have success with at App State.”

Even with a limited amount of time to recruit and without much to show for it yet on the field in terms of production, Louisville football has begun to put the pieces together of what could and should be a special defense in the next two years.

Names are names until they aren’t but for the last three recruiting cycles it’s beyond clear the defense has put a premium on finding the first wave of players to fit what they want to do long-term.

On the defensive line, at linebacker, and in the secondary, the Cards have landed multiple players who will carry the flag as visionaries. As the defensive wins continue to add up on the recruiting trail, expect those same players to make the defense a group that is just as feared as the Cardinals offense.

“Our expectations for the defense as a whole, from where we come from we’ve always been a top 10, top 20 defense, so those are our expectations, Brown said. We were nowhere to meeting those, so we have a long way to go to do it, but I think we made strides because we won seven games. That’s one thing we always pride ourselves on – did we win the game or not.

When Louisville takes the next step into the upper echelon of the ACC and becomes a national player like they were for so long, there will be a lot of talk about Satterfield and the job he’s done as the head coach (and deservedly so). But as fans we can’t forget to give Brown and the entire defensive staff the credit for how they’ve been able to identify top talent and land players who should excel in their system.

How’s that for cleaning up a mess?