CRAWFORD | Makeshift magnificence: Brohm's improv puts Louisville in ACC Championship

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – I can’t confirm that Jeff Brohm threw some chicken wire and a few rolls of duct tape onto the plane before taking his Louisville football team to Miami for a matchup with a spot in the ACC Championship game on the line.

But it wouldn’t surprise me.

In its final ACC game of the season, Louisville threw a touchdown pass to an offensive linemen, completed 9 passes to tight ends (after Brohm took over the program with a nearly bare tight end room), switched placekickers in midstream and got a touchdown run from a backup quarterback.

The result was a win that even MacGyver could appreciate: Louisville 38, Miami 31. Before the postgame Gatorade could sink into Brohm’s clothing, the ACC had updated its Championship Game website to slot No. 10 Louisville against No. 4 Florida State on Dec. 2 at 8 p.m. in Charlotte.

Let’s quickly dispatch with these, only to circle back around to them in the coming days. Brohm becomes the first Louisville coach to win 10 games in his first season at the school and Louisville wins 10 games for the seventh time in school history. The Cardinals become the first Louisville team to reach a conference championship game, and Brohm the first coach in college football history to take two different Power 5 programs to conference championship games in back-to-back seasons.

Now here’s what I want to talk about. He did it with a team picked to finish eighth in the ACC. He did it with 25 players out of the transfer portal, not all of them highly rated.

Those tight ends? Joey Gatewood (3 catches, 51 yards) was a quarterback at Kentucky and UCF before coming to Louisville. Nate Kurisky (5 catches, 50 yards and a touchdown) had caught seven passes all season. Four of his catches on Saturday went for first downs, one a fourth-down conversion, and he had three catches on Louisville’s opening drive, including his TD catch. Josh Lifson had just one catch for 11 yards but it converted a third down when Louisville badly needed it. He played locally for Kentucky Country Day and began his college football career at Wofford.

Louisville had completed only 17 passes to tight ends all season. On Saturday, tight ends accounted for 9 of their 24 completions.

It's just another example of Brohm’s ability to adapt, mold, and otherwise bend his approach to adjust to what he sees on the field.

The touchdown pass to offensive lineman Trevonte Sylvester, who checked in as a tight end, gave the Cards momentum just 12 seconds before halftime. After a struggling Brock Travelstead missed the extra point, Brohm didn’t hesitate to bring in Nick Lopez to kick a 42-yard field goal in the third quarter. The Huntington Beach, Calif., native transferred from Cal, and doesn’t even have a bio on the team website.

“It’s a credit to our team,” Brohm said. “We do carry a lot of things. We want to have a lot of bullets. They (Miami) stopped us a few times, and when they do you’ve got to reach for that holster and pull something else out. You’ve got to do something different. So, it’s important on offense to have some creativity, the ability to use all your weapons, and make sure you have some answers when things get stale. Our defense played good at times, not so good at times, but we made just enough plays to win the game and overcome a lot of our mistakes.”

It has been this way all season. Louisville figured to feature a typical Brohm passing attack, again among the Top 10 nationally, with a veteran starting QB who had played for Brohm at Purdue and knows his system backwards and forwards.

Instead, Louisville’s strengths turned out to be defense and the running game. And after a loss at Pittsburgh, Brohm embraced his inner Knute Rockne and rode running backs Jawhar Jordan and Isaac Guerendo to big wins, including an upset of No. 10 Notre Dame. When defenses, like Miami’s, took that away, he had to look elsewhere for yards, to tight ends, to play-action, even to a quarterback run he sprung near the goal line that allowed backup Evan Conley – Scott Satterfield’s lone QB import – to score up the middle on a misdirection.

“Well, we carried a package with Evan all year long,” Brohm said. “Sometimes I'm too scared to call it, to be quite honest. . . . This was a good-designed run play that we have off a little misdirection and Evan runs hard. It got us five yards and a big touchdown and took a little pressure off (quarterback) Jack (Plummer). We got weapons. We’ve got to use them all.”

Plummer, in the end, was a weapon Louisville needed. After a first-quarter interception, he got better as the game went on. He wound up with 308 yards passing and 3 touchdowns. In the fourth quarter, he completed 6-of-7 passes.

The game-winning touchdown, thrown to Kevin Coleman, switched up the Miami defense, saw two defenders run into each other, and left Coleman to scamper down the sideline for a 58-yard score.

And now Louisville, and the Duct Tape Express, heads home with a 10-1 record heading into its annual rivalry meeting with Kentucky, a trip to the ACC Championship game in its pocket.

After the game, here was Brohm, doused with Gatorade, players celebrating, hoisting the new Howard Schnellenberger Trophy instituted for the rivalry with Miami.

"Howard meant a lot to me as a coach, as a mentor, as a teacher," Brohm said. "I played for him and got a chance to work for him. And when you're a quarterback for somebody who's really known for developing quarterbacks, you know we developed a relationship. I think he gave a lot to our university at Louisville. He gave a lot to Miami. He's given a lot to a lot of other places and I just think because of it all these programs are better and because of it all these programs are relevant. Coach never backed down from any challenge. That's one thing I definitely learned from him as a player and coach, no matter who you're playing, you're going to have a chance to win when you're coached by him. . . . He's missed by all of us, but we carry on his legacy."

For Cardinal fans, the sublime part of this is that it’s only the beginning. Brohm’s recruiting will only get better. He’ll only learn from everything he experiences. The challenges (and the schedule, sure) will get tougher. But this is Year No. 1. This was a “do your best and see what happens” year. This wasn’t supposed to be anything special.

But like many patchwork quilts that are pieced together from bits here and there, sometimes the final result is something you wouldn’t trade for anything.

This is why Louisville wanted so badly to bring Brohm back. It’s why Louisville fans hoped for his arrival so fervently for so long. It’s why most of them would have no complaints about Brohm even had the Cardinals lost Saturday.

It's also why winning this game, with this team, for this coach, in this way, is so much sweeter.

With sweeter things to come.

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