LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – This past Monday, Mark Stoops rolled in with swagger. Jeff Brohm looked like he’d been demoted to assistant chess coach.
Brohm was still stinging from a blowout at SMU, Louisville’s third straight loss. Stoops had just been blown out at Vanderbilt, but appeared to have beaten back the torch-and-pitchfork crowd in Lexington with three wins before that. And he was feeling it.
“Whether you like it or not, I’m a Kentuckian now,” Stoops said.
To quote a former Louisville coach, “Not so fast, my friend.”
Don’t believe everything your REAL ID tells you. Brohm, the down-in-the-dumps hometown hero who feels every loss like the heat of a thousand suns, beat Kentucky 41-0 Saturday with his Thanksgiving leftovers.
Stoops thought he was walking into Louisville on solid ground. But Louisville was no trap game. It was a trap door.
Louisville came into this game held together with ace bandages and hope. And the hope was fraying. By game time, Kentucky actually was the betting favorite. Louisville was missing all of its running backs, its top receiver, two starting linebackers and more. Kentucky was just as banged up but had more available in the playmaker department.
So, this wasn’t exactly a loaves and fishes miracle that Brohm pulled off. But it was a walk-on running back and converted wide receiver miracle. And it did seem to feed most of the crowd of 50,624 in L&N Stadium.
I’m going to say this. If I had to pick any college coach in America to win one big game, it would be Jeff Brohm. Louisville, now, has to find a way to see if it can get him to win 11. But what this team showed, after the past couple of weeks it had, and the injuries it sustained, was a whole lot of character. And that’s a credit to both its players, and its coaches.
“It feels great. I'm not going to lie,” Brohm said after the game. “I mean, I take losing hard. It’s not fun. But you know that sometimes drives you to just figure it out. And if you got enough people that want to figure it out, you can get things done. So, I credit our team. They stuck together.”
The game was more guts than game-planning. Miller Moss barely practiced all week. But he came out on game day and threw for three touchdowns. The first play of the game, he completed a 23-yard pass. Louisville would take an early 7-0 lead.
And Moss didn’t have to carry the load, thanks to a blocked punt, an offensive line that controlled a stout Kentucky defensive front, and a couple of running backs delivered from Amazon on Tuesday. OK, not quite.
Braxton Jennings has been on the roster all season. A running back. Paying for the privilege. The son of Chris Jennings, who spent some time as an NFL running back. A year ago to the day, he was playing his final game at Ashland Blazer, held to 67 yards by Corbin. On Saturday, he ran for 113 on Kentucky.
“Put him on scholarship!” somebody yelled after he accepted the MVP trophy from the Lieutenant Governor. Forget that. The kid should've had a half-dozen NIL offers by the time he walked off the field. A performance like Saturday’s is better than a scholarship. It’s a scholarship for life.
“We knew how big this game was,” said Jennings. “I’ve been watching this game since I was little. … I’ve got guys I played with who played on the other side.”
Boykins moved from receiver in the summer and waited his turn. The North Hardin product made the most of it with 101 yards rushing.
Kentucky, meanwhile, could get nothing going. It had 147 yards of offense. I walked farther than that to back my car. A lot farther.
Louisville ripped through Kentucky’s defense like a Black Friday sale rack. Kentucky gave up 440 yards of offense, 258 on the ground.
Some have suggested to me on social media that Kentucky quit. I would argue that one cannot quit what one did not start. Kentucky entered Louisville’s half of the 50 three times.
With just under six minutes to play in the third quarter, Louisville intercepted Cutter Boley at its own one-yard line. It would hold the ball for the next two months. Check that — it would hold the ball for the next 10 ½ minutes, grinding its way to a touchdown that for all purposes ended the game, and may well have ended Stoops’ Kentucky tenure.
In the coaching business, style points matter. It’s one thing to come to Louisville and lose. It’s another thing to come to Louisville and lose like that. To let a team so far down its depth chart that it had to dig through its media guide run all over you?
How is Kentucky supposed to sell this heading into a second straight offseason with no bowl? You’d need an all-star team of social media influencers. And I’m not talking about Zach Calzada with a stack of Benjamins.
In the end, it was Louisville’s day. It hasn’t been Louisville’s season. The 8-4 finish falls short of what Louisville wanted for itself. But Saturday’s win shows that the program remains resilient. Somewhere between the lowest of lows and Thanksgiving dinner, the program picked itself up and found a way to keep caring.
“We’ve been right in it,” Brohm said. “The fact that we’ve had chances in every game except one — that’s a good feeling. Now we’ve got to figure out how to get over the hump.”
Turns out, on Saturday, a couple of guys who have played in the shadows all season waiting their turn were the ones who got them there.
Somebody option that story, quick.
“I stayed up some nights thinking, ‘When is my opportunity going to come?’” Jennings added. “And it came today. It’s a blessing.”
Louisville didn’t do anything terribly fancy on Saturday. It just played harder, smarter and cleaner than Kentucky. But how did it do that, given how it has played in recent weeks? What inspired that performance? It may not have been anything Brohm said, though he asked reporters to imagine how many times he talked to his team about dumb penalties, then “multiply it by 20” to get the real number.
No, that inspiration may have been as much about what Brohm and his staff did, and the way they did it.
“I really liked his vibe today,” Moss said. “He was just kind of just cutting it loose and I feel like the whole team fed off that energy. I think we could tell how badly he wanted this, and I think the entire team kind of took on that persona.”
If Louisville keeps taking on that persona, it won’t need miracles to win. Just more Saturdays like this one.
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