Louisville football: 3 delayed takeaways from Cards loss to Pittsburgh
By Jacob Lane
The defense nearly won Louisville the game and that’s a big deal
Heading into Saturday’s matchup the biggest question on every one’s mind when it came to Louisville football was “can the defense figure it out, or is this a lost cause?”
There’s no way around it, the performance from Louisville’s defense in prime time against Miami was unfortunate. Giving up multiple big plays without much effort was frustrating, concerning, and discouraging but by no means a reason to give up or lose up.
Scott Satterfield and Bryan Brown both talked about the mistakes being fixable, and while many were panicking the smart Louisville fans knew that time and patience was the ingredients for the recipe of success moving forward.
Sure enough against Pittsburgh, Louisville’s defense bounced back in a major way.
It may not have been a “dominant” performance or one that you’ll remember for years to come, but considering every thing that’s happened with the defense over the last four years, what they did against Pittsburgh was a major accomplishment and a huge step in the right direction.
Not only did Louisville force two turnovers, something they have yet to do this season, but they also held Pittsburgh to 23 points scored – which was the least amount of points allowed to a rank team since they gave up 20 points to FSU back in 2016.
If you look at the stats from this game, it makes no sense how Louisville was able to keep the score so close on defense. They allowed Pittsburgh to win the time of possession battle by nearly 11 minutes, gave up nine third down conversions and allowed over 200 yards passing and 150 yards rushing.
The pass rush was non existent at times, the tackling was shoddy, and the secondary seemed to be doing their best social distancing at times. Yet overall, they looked like a group that had a years worth of time to get things right even though it had been less than a week and nearly won the game against a top 25 team.
That’s the type of progress you like to see (albeit in a win) and if you’re like me, you have hope that the defense can play at a high enough level to win games when the offense isn’t able to produce like we’re used to seeing. That was almost the case on Saturday against a damn good football team.