BOZICH | Pressure on Woodson, IU in Bahamas matchup with Louisville | Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- This is all that was required to quiet the football talk in Wednesday's Kentuckiana newsfeed:

Announce that Pat Kelsey's first University of Louisville men's basketball team will play Mike Woodson's fourth Indiana University team when the programs begin play in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in The Bahamas Nov. 27.

Winning that game will result in more than a likely second-round matchup with mighty Gonzaga (which figures to handle West Virginia in the same bracket).

If Kelsey and the Cardinals win, expect a national stir about how quickly the U of L program is being rebuilt and directed toward bigger things. Instant validation.

If Woodson and the Hoosiers win, there will be shrugs that IU succeeded against a program blending 13 new players off an eight-win season.

If Kelsey and the Cards lose, well, reasonable people will understand that it requires more than five games to bring a program back to relevance.

If Woodson and the Hoosiers lose, it will be difficult to sell seashells and balloons in Bloomington. Instant indigestion.

Advantage, Louisville.

The pressure will be on Woodson, whose program backtracked and missed the NCAA Tournament last season.

Kelsey is working to get Louisville back on the national radar and he can start to achieve that with success in The Bahamas. The Cards should have beaten IU last season in Madison Square Garden. They didn't because, well, they didn't win many games they were supposed to win.

Woodson is working to get Indiana to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, a destination that has eluded the Hoosiers in his first three seasons. Tom Crean brought IU from rubble to the Sweet Sixteen in year four. In the transfer portal/NIL era, one Sweet Sixteen every four seasons is not an unreasonable ask.

A loss to Louisville would shatter the narrative that better days are coming in Bloomington.

With a top-five transfer class that features a new starting backcourt (Myles Rice and Kanaan Carlyle) and fifth-year center Oumar Ballo, Woodson's team is built to win this season. Several players who started last season will likely play off the bench. The transfer portal and a vigorous NIL program enabled IU to recruit proven performers from Arizona (Ballo), Stanford (Carlyle), Washington State (Rice) and Illinois (shooter Luke Goode).

The Hoosiers constructed a nonconference schedule so lacking in marquee games that success on Paradise Islands is mandatory.

Indiana plays one power conference opponent outside the Big Ten. Kansas is off the schedule. The Crossroads Classic ended two seasons ago. Kentucky does not move on to the schedule until next season.

That one power conference team is South Carolina, which will visit Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on Nov. 16. Other than their three games in The Bahamas, the Hoosiers will play eight other non-Big Ten games -- all at home. That's not a path to building a solid strength of schedule.

Indiana will have to perform well in the Bahamas to benefit in the computer power rankings and score with the NCAA Tournament Selection committee. They'll need to beat Louisville and win at least one other game (against Gonzaga, Arizona, Providence or Oklahoma) to put shine on their NCAA Tournament resume.

Beating power conference opponents has been a gap in Woodson's resume at Indiana.

He beat St. John's and Notre Dame but lost to Syracuse in year one.

He beat Xavier and North Carolina but lost big to Arizona and Kansas in year two.

He beat Louisville but lost to Kansas (by four), UConn (by 20) and Auburn (by 28) last season.

That's five wins and six losses — with four losses by 14 or more points.

The Cards have already created buzz for the improvement that Kelsey has brought to the program. Last week in The Athletic, writer Brendan Marks ranked Louisville as the third-best team in the Atlantic Coast Conference behind only (who else?) Duke and North Carolina.

His reasoning?

Kelsey has packed the U of L roster with experienced players like J'Vonne Hadley, Terrance Edwards Jr., Reyne Smith and Chucky Hepburn, who have produced at other schools.

For Hepburn that school was Wisconsin. Hepburn will have no fear of Indiana. In three seasons with the Badgers, Hepburn beat IU three times in five tries, including a 91-79 game in Madison last season.

The IU game will be the fifth of the season for Kelsey's team, after the Cards play four home games against Morehead State, Tennessee, Bellarmine and Winthrop.

It will also be game five for the Hoosiers, who start with Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, Eastern Illinois, South Carolina and North Carolina-Greensboro in Bloomington.

In the computer power rankings posted for next season, the Cards are No. 63 and IU is No. 31 at Barttorvik.com.

That is a 127-point jump from where Torvik's formula had Louisville at the end of Kenny Payne's second season. It's also a bump of 52 spots for the Hoosiers.

The formula obviously likes the additions that Kelsey and Woodson have made to their rosters.

But make no mistake about the coach playing a game he needs to win Nov. 27. That coach is Woodson.

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