Louisville football: Initial thoughts on ACC schedule

I hate not playing Clemson

The immediate reaction around the Twittisphere and from the local radio talking heads this afternoon was mostly a message of positivity.

After all, the one obstacle that has stood in the way of Louisville winning its first outright ACC title and going to the ACC Championship game has been Clemson. The Cardinals lost their first three match-ups against the Tigers by one possession, and every game came down to the final play. Since then Louisville has hit a rough patch, and the Cardinals have had to suffer the consequences. They took serious beatdowns from the Tigers the last three seasons.

However, in Louisville’s first three seasons in the conference- when they came in third, third, and tied for first in the ACC Atlantic- The one constant across those three years is that they fell short literally on the final play of the game against Clemson.

This year, for the first time since 2016, Louisville is projected to be one of the better teams in the conference. So, when Louisville doesn’t have Clemson on its schedule, sure, there’s some reason for optimism.

However, I just flat out do not like this change.

Regardless of how positive the outcome is this season, there is now going to be an asterisk at the end of the regular season conference standings for the Cardinals. If Louisville plays well and winds up near the top of the conference, this was the year that they didn’t have to play Clemson.

Contrarily, if the Cardinals lose momentum this year and regress to the norm after a promising 2019, things will skew ever further the other way. “This was our shot. No Clemson and we still couldn’t get the job done.”

Hear me out, I love the thought of not losing to Clemson for a year. Hell, I love the thought of just getting to play football at all. I love the thought of being back to normal life; writing about anything sports-related at this point.

But, as Louisville football fans, this is what we wanted for decades. We suffered through the years in the 70s and 80s of just god awful football. The 90s saw the Cardinals get squashed repeatedly on astroturf in a soon to be condemned stadium. For two decades from 1975 to 1995, Louisville was independent in football and searching for a conference. Fans suffered through Bob Weber, Ron Cooper Cooper, Steve Kragthorpe; the Missouri Valley, Conference USA, a mixed bag of a Big East Conference.

Now, all of a sudden, when Louisville is finally in a league where the Cardinals get to play the premier teams year in and year out, we want to be excited that we are excluded from playing the best team? Do we have to go back to padding our egos on wins again Georgia Tech and Syracuse?

Forget that. I’d rather take another loss to Clemson and know that Louisville football has another opportunity to play the best of the best. Sure, there’s likely top 25 foes in Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, and, yes, Florida State, Miami, and Pitt bring more than formidable challenges.

Still, Clemson is in Louisville’s division. The Cardinals dropped two division foes to pick up three games against cross-division teams. I’m disappointed that the Cardinals will have to be in the conference championship game to have a hope of getting to hash things out with the ACC’s best this year.

At least we have a contingency plan for football. That’s more than any other conference can say at the moment, and as starved sports fans, we should take the small wins any way we can get them. I’d just have rather played the season as scheduled.