LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- I hate to go all Occam's razor on University of Louisville football, but maybe the simplest explanation for the 2023 season is the best.

Under first-year coach Jeff Brohm, Louisville was an improved football team that beat a good many marginal teams, five of them in one-score games. It got a signature home-field win against a Notre Dame team ranked No. 10 at the time and which finished the regular season ranked No. 16.

It was a team that could not afford mistakes, even against a schedule that spared it some of the tougher ACC challenges. And, in building a 10-1 record, it did play clean football, for the most part, or was able to get away with the mistakes it did make.

The Cardinals rose to No. 9 in the national rankings, and they earned that ranking. They earned a spot in the ACC Championship game, a first for the program. But they were never the ninth-best team in the nation. And when they started playing more talented teams their limitations became more evident. They lost a one-score game to Kentucky, a game they could've won with a cleaner effort. They couldn't move the ball enough to win against a third-string QB for Florida State.

And on Wednesday night in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, first-time starter Miller Moss came off the USC bench and threw for 372 yards and 6 touchdowns in a 42-28 win. He was the third first-time starter to beat them this season.

Louisville's season basically ended Wednesday night on a completed fourth-down pass in which the receiver fell short of the first-down marker (and likely a touchdown, if he could've kept his footing) because of an inaccurate pass short pass that he had to stretch to haul in, from a quarterback, Jack Plummer, who had a dislocated pinky finger on his throwing hand.

Right call by the coaches. Right decision by the quarterback. Bad pass, and in the end, a lack of execution. There were a handful of plays you can point to over the past three games that fit the same template. A touchdown pass thrown a bit low and batted down by Kentucky. A ball dropped in the end zone against Florida State.

On Wednesday night in San Diego, even with the injury to Plummer, Louisville moved the ball on the ground at will. And it executed to start the game, got a stop on USC's first possession, marched down and scored, got a missed USC field goal on its second possession, and had a chance to take early control of the game. Instead, a missed blocking assignment, a fumble by Plummer, and USC winds up with a touchdown to tie the game. A blocked punt later in the half gave USC another short field.

To be sure, talent was a factor. While USC was highly depleted, the young players who stepped in were blue-chip recruits. Any one of them would've made headlines in Louisville had he committed to the Cardinals. They're just another player for USC. Talent matters, as does leadership.

USC got a major boost from Tahj Washington, who has declared for the NFL Draft but played in the bowl game anyway. He had big catches early to help the confidence of Moss and the rest of USC's offense.

On the Louisville side, when receivers had chances to make plays, often they didn't. They couldn't get separation. Louisville wideouts caught only 11 passes for 82 yards in the game. The longest wide receiver reception was for 13 yards. There's a reason that Brohm went volume shopping in the transfer portal for wideouts and tight ends.

Nor could Louisville's defensive line bother Moss. It recorded no sacks and only two quarterback hurries in 33 pass attempts for USC.

Sometimes it just takes one guy to lift a team. Louisville running back Isaac Guerendo tried to be that guy. He carried for 161 yards, was the leading receiver with five catches for 42 yards and had 32 yards on a pair of kickoff returns. His 241 all-purpose yards set a Louisville school record for a bowl game, breaking a mark Lamar Jackson posted in his freshman-year effort against Texas A&M in the Music City Bowl.

But that wasn't enough for Louisville. Jamari Thrash, its top receiver, had played injured the final half of the season and sat out of the bowl game. Of the 36 third-down conversion passes Plummer threw this season, Thrash caught 14 of them. Without him, there was no one who could separate and deliver. And when guys were open, Plummer struggled to deliver the ball on target.

So this is the simple explanation. Louisville was more the team that analytics ranked in the 30-range than the top 15 that the human polls ranked it, and that's about right, in the end. The tale of talent and depth will show that two key defections for the bowl game hurt Louisville than 10 key defections (including a Heisman winning quarterback) for USC. For Louisville in Brohm's first season, the line was that fine.

Brohm deserves credit for pulling the right strings to get Louisville to where it got this season. But pulling strings only works for so long.

USC coach Lincoln Riley will attack defenses where they are most vulnerable and Miller Moss was capable of reading the Cardinal defense and finding open receivers. Louisville had not faced that kind of offensive combination all season, even if USC was depleted. And it showed. USC attacked Louisville's safeties relentlessly. And won.

And while Brohm deserves credit for cobbling Louisville into a 10-1 team, no matter the combination of factors, he'll also be a victim of the expectations that created.

That means as good as the season was – and few seriously had this Louisville team winning 10 games and going to the ACC championship game – the manner of its ending will keep the program from reaping the full rewards of that accomplishment, though anyone tempted to look at the late games Louisville could have won would do well to remember to remember the earlier games it could easily have lost.

At 10-1, any second-guessing of Brohm seemed foolish. After going 0-3 in big games to finish, there will be more questions. Uppermost in the minds of most fans is whether there was no viable alternative at quarterback, even after Plummer got hurt? Likely not. Coaches aren't known for leaving guys with the ability to win games sitting on the bench. And whoever was playing would've been dealing with the same struggling receiver corps. Still, a quarterback who was simply accurately making the throws on the plays that were called would've made this a much closer game. There are questions.

"We're sitting at 10-1 and feeling good about ourselves," Brohm said. "And then we kind of just let things slip at the end. And that's disappointing."

At least fans have this. Brohm wasn't trying to spin the good without acknowledging the bad.

Simply put, it was a pretty good first year that missed some opportunities at the end to be great.

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