The Cardinals vs the Rebels came down to the wire last night, as Ole Miss defeated Louisville after Lucas Carneiro drilled a 48-yard field goal as time expired. There are no moral victories in football, but Louisville has a lot of positives to take away from this Week 1 showdown.
Lincoln Kienholz threw for 307 yards in his first career start and showed his legs, while also leading the Cardinals in rushing with 69 yards on the ground. As for areas Louisville has to fix and improve on, it is once again the unforced errors.
The Cardinals made some costly mistakes in this game that Brom must fix; if they hadn’t, the outcome would have looked a whole lot different.
Louisville football has to limit the unforced errors
The big one that everyone is going to talk about is the bad snap on the Cardinals' punt in the second quarter. Louisville turned the ball over in the second quarter after they snapped it over their punter's head, and the ball was recovered on UofL’s 12-yard line.
Ole Miss then went on to take a 10-3 lead after scoring a touchdown in 4 plays, making the Cardinals pay for this bad mistake.
The other big one was the penalties. The Cardinals had nine penalties this game, including one crucial penalty in the fourth quarter. The Cardinals were down by seven and forced Ole Miss to try a long field goal, and Carneiro missed, but DJ Waller was called for roughing the kicker. Ole Miss would go on to score a touchdown seven plays later and take a 14-point lead with under seven minutes to go.
“You try to win all those little battles- turnover battle, penalty battle; the snap over the punter's head was costly, the roughing the kicker was costly,” stated Brohm after the game. “So, those two we can’t have happen.”
Louisville showed their toughness battling back after these two costly mistakes, but as Brohm said, they can’t happen if you want to beat a top-10 team in the country. The Cardinals came up just short by losing on a last-second field goal, and if just one of these costly errors hadn’t happened, the game would have been completely different.
If Louisville snaps it cleanly, maybe the defense gets another stop, as it played extremely well in the first half. If Waller doesn’t rough the kicker, Louisville gets the ball around midfield and is only down seven and not 14.
The Cardinals clearly have the talent and the roster to compete with some of the best in the nation, but now they can't shoot themselves in the foot in these situations. They need to learn from these huge Week 1 mistakes, as they have SMU in two weeks, and last night showed that this team has a real chance to compete not only for an ACC Title but also for a spot in the College Football Playoff.
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