LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Jeff Brohm once played for a football team whose clocks couldn't tell time.
Or maybe they told the only time that mattered.
When Brohm was with the San Francisco 49ers, he remembers looking at clocks around the facility and seeing no numbers. Where the numbers ordinarily would have been, there was one word repeated around the face.
Now.
Now. Now. Now. Morning to night.
"The time is now," Brohm said. "So while you always prepare for the future, the time is now."
Brohm told that story Monday at Louisville's annual football kickoff luncheon in a sold-out Galt House ballroom, and if there ever were a Louisville team for which the message fit, this one might be it.
The Cardinals learned Monday that they will begin the season ranked No. 24 in the Associated Press poll, their first appearance in the preseason AP Top 25 since 2017.
That's the good news. The more urgent news is that No. 9 is waiting for them.
Louisville opens Sept. 6 against Ole Miss in Nashville, facing a program coming off a College Football Playoff semifinal appearance. The Rebels finished last season No. 3 and begin this one in the Top 10.
So if Louisville wants to know whether its time really has arrived, it won't have to wait long.
In some ways, Brohm has spent three seasons building toward this.
He returned home and immediately took Louisville to the ACC championship game. He has raised expectations, accumulated talent and built enough depth that, at Monday's luncheon, he could talk less about whether Louisville has enough players and more about whether those players can do enough with what they have.
"We do have potential," Brohm said. "And now we just got to put it all together."
There it was again. Now.
Preseason rankings are mostly a recognition of possibility. Louisville hasn't earned the No. 24 ranking with anything it has done this season because it hasn't done anything this season.
But the ranking says something about how the Cardinals are viewed.
Louisville has one of the country's most dynamic running backs in Isaac Brown, experienced playmakers around him and the kind of depth Brohm has spent three seasons trying to build.
And it has a quarterback who has been waiting for his own clock to strike now.
Lincoln Kienholz spent three years at Ohio State, mostly watching. He told the luncheon crowd Monday that the transition wasn't easy. In high school, he played all the time. Then he went to Ohio State and didn't.
"It's been a long three years of sitting the bench," Kienholz said. "Just not getting a lot of playing time when I feel like I should have."
He kept working. He watched film. He trained. He traveled to California to work with his quarterback coach.
"And I feel like now's my time," Kienholz said.
The 2026 Louisville Football Kickoff Luncheon at the Galt House downtown.
Brohm heard him. Later, when the subject turned to his new starting quarterback, he repeated it.
"He wasn't happy sitting for three years, and now it's his time to shine," Brohm said.
There's an awful lot of now around Louisville football these days.
That doesn't mean this season represents some kind of ultimatum for Brohm, that Louisville must make the College Football Playoff or the season is a failure.
It means something subtler.
At some point, a program stops asking whether it can become a contender and starts finding out what it can do once it is in position to become one.
Louisville has been good under Brohm. It has played in an ACC championship game. It has beaten good teams. It has produced NFL players. It has reached the point where beginning a season in the Top 25 seems less like a surprise than confirmation of where the program believes it belongs.
The next step is beating teams that belong there, too. Ole Miss provides that opportunity before Louisville has even had time to settle into September. Brohm called the Rebels a "semifinal team" and the neutral-site opener an opportunity "to showcase what we're all about."
There will be time later to find out whether Louisville can navigate the ACC, whether Kienholz can deliver over a full season, whether the Cardinals' defensive depth is as good as advertised and whether a team ranked No. 24 in August deserves to be ranked considerably higher in November.
But there won't be much time. No. 9 Ole Miss will see to that.
Which brings Brohm back to those clocks.
There were no numbers. No reminder that it was early, no assurance that there would be plenty of time later.
Only now.
"Our players need to be hungry and understand that it's not going to be easy," Brohm said. "That hunger has to be there every single day, back to back to back."
Then he finished with another message appropriate for a clock without numbers and a ballroom crowd in August.
"Let's go get this thing done."
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