Louisville football: 3 biggest storylines as Cards travel to face Pittsburgh

Are the defensive issues scheme, simple mistakes, or a sign of bigger issues?

In the words of Bill Belichick – “We’re moving on to Pittsburgh.”

Last week sucked, there’s no way around it. Watching an experienced defense make such costly and avoidable mistakes in a ABC prime time game is up there with one of the more frustrating things Louisville football’s done recently. And that’s saying something.

But as GG Robinson described to us last week on the BRL Podcast, Sundays are when the team comes back together, watches film, and goes back out onto the practice field to get things right – and so now it’s time to move forward.

That’s exactly what Louisville did this weekend, and now all eyes will be on correcting the mistakes made and getting ready to battle against a talented Pittsburgh offense.

For the second week in a row, Louisville’s going to face another quarterback with the ability to take advantage of weak coverage, or simple mistakes, in Kenny Pickett. The senior quarterback and Maxwell Award Watch List nominee has already put together two solid performances against FCS opponent Austin Peay and Syracuse.

If Louisville isn’t able to fix the issues that Presley Meyer laid out yesterday on BigRedLouie.com, an offense like Pittsburgh with a quarterback like Pickett at the helm will easily be able to take advantage.

So the question is simple.. Is Saturday another “one-off” that can be coached through or is Bryan Brown dealing with something bigger?

While I do believe there are some small concerns about what we saw on Saturday, I trust Satterfield and company when they say the mistakes were avoidable and can be corrected with film & preparation. Each big play felt worse than the one before it, but when you take the back-to-back 75 yard touchdowns away, you see Louisville held Miami to just 250 yards passing and 85 yards rushing. That’s fairly impressive considering the prowess of D’Eriq King and Cam’Ron Harris.

If they can go without making such glaring mental mistakes, Louisville should be able to limit the Pittsburgh offense which came back down to earth a little bit more last week following their 55-0 win over Austin Peay.

Against a Syracuse defense that finished 115th in total defense last year Pittsburgh still picked up 215 yards passing and 127 yards rushing but only scored 21 points and never fully looked comfortable.

That’s got to be encouraging for the Louisville football defense and you’d hope they’d be able to build on the limitations Syracuse exposed in the Panthers offense. Pitt will look to establish the run and control the pace of the game, which starts with their lead back Vincent Davis. Head coach Pat Narduzzi has run the ball 60 times in two games and I’d expect that trend to continue.

Louisville’s linebackers have played extremely well against the run, and considering Pittsburgh has averaged just 3.2 yards per carry, I think the Cards will be able to limit the sting. If that’s the case, it’ll affect the play-action set up for Pickett and the Pittsburgh offense but it certainly won’t derail it alone.

Pickett has completed nearly 70 percent of his passes already throwing for 492 yards and three touchdowns (all of which came against Syracuse), while rushing for another two scores on the ground. He’s got solid weapons in DJ Turner and Jordan Addison who both are capable of making plays all over the field.

However, if we see a second straight week of 50, 60, 70-yard touchdown plays and hear more about “mental mistakes” and “blown assignments” than I think there will need to be some more questions asked about what the defense is doing.