Notre Dame Opponent Preview | Louisville
Jeff Brohm was supposed to be Louisville’s head coach in 2019, at least in the eyes of alums who desperately wanted him to be, but with the program in need of a major rebuild and him two years further down the road into a rebuild at Purdue, he passed on the opportunity at that time.
He wasn’t going to pass on it when the job came up again.
Scott Satterfield didn’t fix all of Louisville’s issues, but he left the program in a much better state than what he inherited from Bobby Petrino. With Brohm close to hitting the ceiling of what Purdue could be in today’s college football, this was the perfect time to go back home.
It didn’t take long for Brohm to put his stamp on the program. Deion Sanders might be the only one who has flipped his previous roster more than Brohm has. They’ve added 40 scholarship players (freshmen and transfers), which makes them incredibly difficult to project this season.
They aren’t bringing back a lot of great talent. They are bringing in a lot of transfers with plenty of experience and it should make them competitive if they can figure everything out in terms of culture and chemistry.
The Cardinals don’t play Notre Dame until October 7, so they have five games to get some answers before then.
Post-Spring SP+ Ranking
They are 36th overall. They’re 50th on offense and 20th on defense.
This is one of those ratings that could look really smart or really dumb depending on how all of the pieces fit. I would be surprised if they have a defense that ends up being top-20 caliber, but I do think the offense could be a bit better than where they are projected.
Key losses
The most prominent one is QB Malik Cunningham, a dual-threat who had an up and down career. He was mostly a dangerous runner and an inconsistent passer, which probably means he wouldn’t have been a fit in Brohm’s offense.
WR Tyler Hudson and TE Marshon Ford were their two leading receivers and were undrafted free agents this spring.
The biggest losses are on defense where edge YaYa Diaby and edge Yasir Abdullah were both drafted. Louisville had one of the better pass rushes in the country last fall and these two were by far the biggest reason why.
They also lost their two leading tacklers in LBs Momo Sanogo and Monty Montgomery. LB Dorian Jones would have been first in line to step in for one of them, but he ended up following Satterfield to Cincinnati.
CB Kei’Trei Clark was also drafted and he was their best cover guy. He’s going to be difficult to replace.
The program lost seven transfers after the spring, including their starting tight end, a starting linebacker, and their starting kicker, so it wasn’t just players being pushed out.
Key additions
The answer to that for Louisville was adding 11 transfers after the start of the spring semester.
They have six transfers added on the offensive line and two of them are expected to be starters, but they brought in several with starting experience. Some of these players didn’t practice in the spring so it could take a little bit in camp and the beginning of the season to find their best five.
Even though they have three starters returning from the secondary, they brought in five defensive backs including CB Marcus Washington (former blue-chip recruit from Georgia), and CB Storm Duke and safety Cam Kelly who played last season at North Carolina, but were at different schools for spring practice.
Edge Stephon Herron had 40 pressures at Stanford last season. He’s a much better player against the pass than vs the run, but he should help make up for losing Diaby and Abdullah. The offense is going to get a makeover and will go from a run-heavy scheme to the pass-happy one Brohm prefers.
QB Jack Plummer, who played vs Notre Dame at Purdue and Cal the last two seasons, was brought in to be the starter. He did lose his job at Purdue, though, and Brohm also added QB Brady Allen from Purdue as well. If Plummer doesn’t start the season well, we could be seeing Allen when the Irish visit Louisville.
Whoever the quarterback is will have some talent to throw to. WR Jamari Thrash had 1,122 yards at Georgia State last season and WR Kevin Coleman was an elite recruit who was with Deion Sanders at Jackson State last season.
4-star TE Jamari Johnson is expected to be a contributor immediately and might even start with the lack of options there.
Top returners and returning production
They were 99th in returning production. “Were” is appropriate because they have added players in the portal since this was last updated and that has an impact on that ranking.
C Bryan Hudson was their best player up front last season and he at least brings some stability to what will be a reworked O-line.
RB Jawhar Jordan is back after leading the team in rushing (5.74 yards per carry, 815 yards). Those numbers will go down this fall, mostly because of the scheme. Purdue has been putrid at running the football the last four seasons so it will be interesting to see how much emphasis is put on the running game.
DL Ashton Gillotte had 8 havoc plays last season and he’s a plus pass rusher (23% win rate on true pass sets).
CB Jarvis Brownlee (16.5 Havoc plays) is the top playmaker returning in the secondary and joins two other returning starters.
One big question
How good can the defense be?
Brohm has done a good job of highlighting his best skill players in the passing game and that is likely to continue, but they’ll be running a new scheme on defense and the losses in the front seven are substantial.
They were a top-25 defense last fall and so much of that had to do with the Havoc rate (19.8%). Six of the top-seven in tackles for loss are gone and that’s 62.5 of their 97 TFLs not returning. A combined 69 Havoc plays came from Diaby, Abdullah, Sanogo, and Montgomery.
I don’t think they brought enough transfer talent to replace that.
The offense should at least be average. A lot of projections for them this season are with the expectation that the defense will be close to what they were last season. I don’t think the front seven is good enough for this defense to be close to top-20.
How they’ve recruited
Louisville’s recruiting has been boosted by NIL and it helped with their latest class, which featured six blue-chips (4-star prospects) out of the 15 they signed. That only brings up the blue-chip ratio to 14.2%, though.
The transfer portal has been huge for them in the last two years and they have 11 transfers who are projected to start for them this fall. They brought in 10 transfers who were ranked as blue-chips out of high school (but who mostly haven’t played like blue-chips in college).
Adding 25 total transfers means they probably will find enough there to fill in some gaps on the roster, but it will likely be enough to keep them in the middle of the pack in the ACC and not good enough to hang with far superior talent.
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