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College football is incredible. I see the passion in other sports and the tradition, and I respect it all, but the storylines, the emotions, the coaching personalities, the portal, the conference chaos, the playoff structure, the rollercoaster of wins and losses in a sport that still values single regular season games more than any other…all wrapping up a season with your defensive MVP, oversized spoon in hand, eating baked beans from the vat of a trophy with a removable top. It’s beautiful. I think the average fan would paint 2025 Louisville Football as “disappointing”, but that emotion is predicated on the expectations being built by this staff over the last few seasons. Nine wins is nine wins, and while everyone from Jeff Brohm to the last man on staff knows there were missed opportunities, there are also over a hundred other teams who wish they could have celebrated nine times this year that included a win over a Top 5 team, and blanking their rival in a beatdown of epic proportions. It’s doesn’t mean we gloss over the fumbled opportunities, but we certainly are not in a position as a fanbase to dismiss nine win seasons and multiple trophy game victories. This program has reached some pretty high highs, if you will, and has also been at the lowest of lows. While we can push for more, strive for better, and now donate our way into more renowned athletes, there is no denying we are much closer to those highs than we are to those dreadful lows. I’ll celebrate the victories as we wrap 2025. Offseason starts today. Go Cards.
OFFENSE Coming into 2025 the expectations for the offense was to have the running back room be the engine of the car and let Miller Moss just keep it between the lines. What we ended up seeing was that less than a month into the season the engine kept blowing a gasket or overheating and the staff tried to lean on the “keep it in the lines” driver to operate a high powered vehicle, on a tight road…at night. Don’t misinterpret this as me pointing all blame to Moss, it certainly wasn’t all on him, but the injuries and the O-line play at times all merged into some frustrating performances that had the Brohm lead offense that was Top 4 in 2023 and 2024, sitting an embarrassingly low 11th in the ACC. That may be good enough to win a few games here and there, but not good enough to compete for championships, and that is where I think Brohm has to see the importance of not just coaching up solid QB’s, but bringing in arm talent that can elevate the offense to the next level. The Cards showed good effort in the second half in Boca Raton to bounce back from a challenging first half that was tougher to digest than a massive bowl of baked beans sitting in the sun. At various points this year the line was good, Moss looked good, RBs looked good, but it’s on this staff to make it all work together. We saw some of that during the later parts of the game. Lets build on it rolling into next season.
DEFENSE While Toledo didn’t go down without a fight, the defense had another respectable game by limiting the Rockets to 3 first half points and roughly 100 yards of offense. The third quarter was more of the same and I was metaphorically “celebrating the graduation of my baby boys walking across the stage” to close out the season before they tripped on the step, face planted on the stage, and had their pants fall down in the fourth quarter, giving up 160 yards and 19 points. But they recovered, and held on long enough to get the win…and the beans. Coming into this year I felt like Ron English was wearing ‘The Riddler’ suitcoat from the 60’s Batman series as we had more questions than answers on nearly every group. Then English and Hagan made some moves, pulled the right handles, pushed the right buttons, and produced a Top 25 defense nationally, and a group that was easily the strongest and most reliable of the three phases week in and week out. Sometimes the unknowns in life can produce some surprising results, and in this case English, who was heavily scrutinized the year prior, stepped up and fielded a defensive unit I think was good enough to win the ACC, and maybe more. So lets celebrate the growth this year, but also use this as a steppingstone to what this staff can do with their backs against the wall. I’m already excited for next year’s defense.
SPECIAL TEAMS As you may have noticed from the outlines above I’m really trying to keep a positive spin on the end of the year recap, and there was without questions some positive in the area of special teams, notably two kickers who we could trot out once we crossed midfield and have a sense of comfort, but there was also some big, often glaring, weaknesses in this group. While we can chalk up some to the distance, six missed FGs is not great, and seven missed the two years prior is a bad trend. Worse? Three missed extra points, including one which lost a game. Poor snaps, tough holds, and a punting game which often disappointed. Build on the good, but lets dig into some reoccurring issues that are now costing us wins. When you have the talent, the goal should always be ‘don’t spill the beans’.
