LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — For two and a half quarters Friday night, Louisville football was trapped in its own bad dream.
The L&N Stadium crowd — subdued after the first offensive drive got stuffed — watched in what felt like eerie silence as James Madison’s defensive front punched above its weight, Louisville’s run game went nowhere, and the Dukes flirted with the role of spoiler.
The game had all the ingredients of an early-season upset stew: a fourth-down gamble gone wrong, drive-killing penalties, a fumble on the edge of field goal range, and a rushing attack that started the game with negative yards and needed nearly three quarters to find a pulse.
But then, like a thunderstorm rolling in from the Ohio, lightning struck. And Louisville found itself a 28-14 winner.
Three strikes.
Strike One: Facing a 3rd-and-1 from his own 34, Miller Moss found Chris Bell over the middle. Bell caught the ball near midfield, hit the gas, and didn’t stop until he’d gone 64 yards to tie the game.
Chris Bell attempts to make a first-quarter touchdown pass, but it was broken up as he went to the ground.
Strike Two:Â On the very next possession, Clev Lubin crashed through and hammered JMU quarterback Alonza Barnett in the end zone. The ball popped free. A.J. Green pounced. Touchdown, Louisville. The Cards had their first lead of the night.
Strike Three: With 3:31 to play and the Cards clinging to that tenuous edge, Isaac Brown — who had spent most of the night looking for daylight and finding defenders instead — broke loose for a 78-yard touchdown run that turned relief into release and put the game away.
“We hung in there on a rough night,” head coach Jeff Brohm said. “Our defense came through for us. They did a great job. The key touchdown in the end zone was the critical one that got us over the hump.”
The win was loud at the end, but it started as a whisper. Louisville managed just 98 yards of offense in the first half, going 0-for-2 in red zone touchdown chances and trailing 7-6 at the break. That included a failed fourth-and-1 run from their own 39 and a pair of stalled drives that ended in Cooper Ranvier field goals.
JMU struck first, capitalizing on that early gamble and a defensive holding call to punch in a 3-yard touchdown pass from Barnett to Lacota Dippre. The Dukes looked poised, physical, and efficient. Their best drive came out of the halftime locker room — 9 plays, 75 yards, and a TD run by Matthew Sluka that pushed their lead to 14-6.
Louisville needed a spark. It got a match dropped on kerosene.
After Bell’s touchdown turned the tide, the Louisville defense took over. Lubin finished with 9 tackles, 1.5 sacks and the forced fumble. T.J. Quinn led the team with 11 tackles. The defense sacked JMU quarterbacks six times and allowed just 198 total yards — only 104 of them through the air.
“Defensively, man, we did some really good things,” Brohm said. “They were on the field a long time. I had a feeling in camp that these guys were really starting to gel.”
Moss finished 13-for-23 for 151 yards, with the 64-yarder to Bell as his highlight. Brown ran for 104 yards on 12 carries, almost all of it coming after halftime. It was his seventh 100-yard game and his fourth TD run of 60 or more yards in his young career.
Louisville coach Jeff Brohm rushes toward an official to lodge a complaint in the first half of Louisville's win over James Madison.
“He’s a quiet young man,” Brohm said of Brown. “But he’s slippery. And when we get him some space, that’s when he’s dangerous.”
Bell had four catches for 83 yards and a sparkplug effect on the sideline before his game-breaking score.
The run game still raised questions. The offensive line still has work to do. Brohm admitted Louisville “did not have a good enough plan” for James Madison’s high-pressure blitz packages, which he said they hadn’t shown much of on tape. “They were going to play feast or famine — and they got to us quite a bit,” he said. “Luckily, we hit a big pass, and we hit a big run.”
For James Madison, the frustration was thick.
“I feel like ultimately, we lost the game,” head coach Bob Chesney said. “We were in position to not have a lot of those things happen — the penalties, the mistakes — and it just showed up here. Hats off to Louisville. But that’s what’s disappointing. We lost the game.”
Louisville is 2-0. The Cards get a bye week before returning to host Bowling Green on Sept. 20. Brohm, for all his dislike of early-season breaks, said this one may come at the right time.
“There’s a lot to learn from this win,” he said. “We can definitely play better. But I’m proud of our team. They came through and played hard to the end. That’s the sign of a team that really wants to win.”
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