LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Let's not kid ourselves. Louisville could beat Air Force 63-0 in Tuesday's First Responder Bowl in Dallas and not erase the bad feeling of its 52-21 rivalry loss to Kentucky in its season finale in Cardinal Stadium.
The Wildcat paw on the rear end of Cardinal football is going to be around for a little while. There aren't many bowl games capable of erasing it. You can drink as much water as you want after eating the ghost pepper, it's not going to stop burning.
At the same time, you probably don't want to down a bottle of tabasco sauce behind it. That's what the Louisville football team will be trying to avoid when it faces the run-oriented Falcons at 3:30 on Tuesday (ESPN broadcast).
Louisville coach Scott Satterfield has been selling his players on the importance of writing a new ending to their season, on putting more distance between his program and the events of Nov. 27. And he said his team has prepared for this bowl as if that is its intention.
"Not finishing on that low note," Satterfield said, when asked about some of the positives of a bowl opportunity. "I mean, we got to finish on a high note. There's no question about it that we're not out here just to go through the motions. Our guys have come out like they have a purpose. . . . They've been focused, they've come out, they've gone to work."
Satterfield said he didn't see the blowout loss to UK coming. Looking at Kentucky and how it had played over the course of the season, and looking at his own team, he figured the game would be competitive. He saw a Kentucky team that had won some close games, and he knew his team had been close to victories against some good opponents.
What happened, however, was disastrous.
"You have to come back from that," he said. "You know, we picked a bad day to have a bad day. That's not the day you want to have a bad day. I really had no idea -- I thought it'd be a very competitive game, we'd be, you know, neck and neck all the way to the end of that game. And it didn't happen. They played a great game, we played a terrible game, and that's what happened. So we've got to continue to get better. As you go through the season, we were very competitive in every conference game, you're right there, you're close, you won some but you're close in the others. And then you also go back and look at Kentucky play, what was there? See, they had a lot of close games as well. So, I was like, 'Man, this is going to be one of these games, it'll come down to it.' We scored, we tied it up, you think, 'OK here we go,' and all of a sudden, they just got on a roll, and we never got any kind of momentum back. We just lost it. But we've got to bounce back. That's why I was encouraged when we came back to practice, the guys were energetic. There was a lot of negativity that's been floating around the last little bit, and it's easy to get caught up into that if you start listening to it. We don't have time to do that. As coaches, as players, we don't have time, we've got a job to do. We've got to come back and get better and continue to try to improve."
Air Force, forget its military mission, is all about the ground attack in football. They rank No. 129 out of 130 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision in passing, and they don't care.
"They don't throw it. They run the football. They're the No. 1 rushing team in the country," Louisville coach Scott Satterfield said. "They occupy the football, they're No. 1 in that. Their time of possession is No. 1 in the country. They limit the possessions of the opponent. What we've told our team is that you're not going to get the ball very many times, on average seven times is all you got to get it, so you've got to make it count. When you get the ball, you have to score points on your all your possessions, for the most part. And then you've got to try to slow down their running game. They want ugly. They get three yards, they're happy, because it's three yards, three and three, then it's fourth and one and going to go for it. That's how they run their offense. They're 31 out of 40 on fourth down this year, because it's fourth and one and they run that option and try to get it. They're a play-hard team. They don't beat themselves. Their defense is right like, No. 60 in the country, you know, because they only have to defend something like 50 plays a game. It's a very unique team."
In fact, Satterfield said, in preparation for Air Force's triple-option attack, the staff didn't even have its scout team use a football while teaching the various responsibilities for Louisville's defenders.
"You know they're going to ride the fullback up, they're going to read that veer," Satterfield said. "(The quarterback) can hand it, he can pull it and he can run, or run the option on the edge there, you have to fit right. You know, the first three days we didn't even have a ball out there. Because you just got to get you got to hit the fullback. You've got to hit the quarterback. You've got to hit the pitch man. Everybody's got to do their job and their assignment, regardless of where the ball is. And, you know, because if you get outflanked that's when they hit the big play. It's different for sure."
Satterfield said the coaches have kept practices light, for the most part, and have tried to make the bowl preparation a fun experience for players. The team, as usual, is strapped up with a monitoring system that measures energy expended and other physiological measurements. Satterfield said he was encouraged at the high work rate his players have put in during practice.
Like a year ago, when the Cardinals ended on a high note against Wake Forest, he said they don't appear to have let discouragement dampen their approach, and that's a winning attitude.
"Our guys are excited to go play this game," he said. "They're excited to try to end on a high note."
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