LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- In yet another close loss on Saturday, Louisville didn't get out-talented. It didn't get out-schemed. It got out-disciplined. By itself.
That's the hardest kind of loss to swallow. Because it's not about who you play. It's about who you are.
The Cardinals have lost three games by a total of eight points. They didn't get run off the field in any of them. They were in position to win all three late. And, in all of them, they didn't just commit penalties. They committed crimes against momentum.
They rank No. 117 in the nation in penalty yards, a stat where the fewer you have, the higher you're ranked.
On Friday night against Clemson, it was a handful of flags that turned a one-point knife fight into an autopsy report. Before that, it was overtime against Cal. Before that, it was a red-zone chance to beat Virginia. The common thread isn't the opponent. It's the enemy within.
The penalty is the point
Louisville head coach Jeff Brohm didn't try to hide from it Monday.
"Those fall on the head coach. So the head coach has to get that fixed this week," Brohm said. "That'll be the No. 1 priority to make sure that we try to eliminate those as much as we can, especially any 15 yarders. That can't happen ever again."
He came back to it again and again. The Virginia loss wasn't a penalty problem. That was a pair of turnovers for touchdowns and a missed field goal. But when he talked about Cal. When he talked about Clemson. Every time he replayed a winnable game in his head, the same images flashed: a good play, followed by a yellow flag, followed by a long walk backward.
"Virginia, we threw the ball in that overtime, went down and just didn't convert on third and goal," Brohm said. "Cal, I believe we ran the ball for nine yards, ran the ball to get the first down, and unfortunately had a 15-yard penalty. So that set us back. And then this past game … we had some costly penalties, multiple costly penalties, that backed us up.
"So we've gone back and looked at it thoroughly to try to make sure that we don't shoot ourselves in the foot anymore."
The problem for Louisville is that this isn't just a feeling. The numbers back it up.
By the numbers
Chart Louisville's accepted penalties this season and a picture emerges long before you even look at the opponent.
Roughly a third of the flags are holding calls — linemen and tight ends grabbing at the point of attack. Another big slice are pre-snap or operation errors: false starts, illegal substitutions, delays of game, illegal shifts and formations. Add those together and you're talking about roughly two-thirds of Louisville's penalties coming before the ball is even in play or because there were blocking issues.
Then there's the composure column: unsportsmanlike conduct, personal fouls, and to a lesser degree roughing the passer, face masks, a horse-collar tackle. Those have piled up, too. And they're not coming from one hot-headed villain you can bench and solve the problem. They're spread out across the roster. A receiver here, a defensive end there, a tight end, a lineman, a linebacker. It's not one guy losing his cool. It's a team that hasn't mastered its own thermostat in some cases, or is just trying to make a play in others.
And in the closest games, those numbers come with faces and timestamps.
Virginia: In another game that went deep into the script, Louisville reached overtime with a chance to win and couldn't finish a goal-to-go sequence. In that game, the catastrophe wasn't a penalty, but it was no less self-inflicted. It was a pick six from quarterback Miller Moss, who flung the ball up for grabs as he was falling rather than take a third down sack.
Cal: In overtime, Louisville got exactly the kind of play you want — a 9-yard run on second-and-short deep in scoring range. First down, momentum, you love your chances to walk it off. Instead, a 15-yard block-below-the-waist penalty on tight end Nate Kurisky erased the gain and turned 2nd-and-1 into 2nd-and-long from way back. The drive never recovered. That penalty won't show up on a highlight, but it's the moment the story changed.
Clemson: This one should be in a clinic tape titled "How Not To Close." A horse-collar penalty turned a big third-quarter sack into first-and-goal for the Tigers. In the fourth quarter, a long Louisville run that would've flipped field position was wiped out by a holding call. A potential momentum-swinging fumble recovery was neutralized by an unsportsmanlike penalty in the chaos that followed. A false start on the final offensive chance turned "just five yards" into a much tougher ask in the last minutes. A hold on the final punt return shoved the last-gasp drive back to the 8-yard line.
Taken individually, any one of those is survivable. Put together, in one-score games, they're the difference between a season that feels frustrating and one that feels special. The difference between Playoffs and Pop Tarts, if that.
This is what Brohm means when he talks about the "fine line" in college football. Louisville hasn't been blown out. It's been blotted out by its own ink.
The mental game
Inside the building, nobody is pretending this is just bad luck or picky officiating.
"I mean, obviously we know it's just… it killed us the last couple games," tight end Nate Kurisky said. "So, man, that's a big emphasis right now with us. So everybody's trying to keep everybody accountable. That's all we really can do, is just try to cut it out as much as you can."
Defensive end AJ Green took it a step further.
Jeff Brohm speaks with an official during the first half of a loss to Clemson.
"Football is an emotional sport," he said. "Being able to control your emotions is a big thing. And for the most part, I think we do control our emotions — it's just sometimes it gets the best of us. And being able to, you know, limit that and have a little bit more self-control.
"Like you say, the ref catches the second person that does something, not the first person. So just being smart, knowing that if you do something, he may not see what caused you to do it or caused your reaction. So react appropriately. I think that's the biggest thing for us — to be able to react appropriately."
That's really the crux of it. Louisville doesn't have a talent problem. It has a reaction problem. Not just what happens, but how it responds when something happens.
Composure isn't a bonus for good teams. It's the baseline. Right now, Louisville is learning that the hard way.
The head coach and the heat
Brohm has had a lot land on his plate in the last week. A one-point loss. A fan who allegedly sent threats to his phone, including threats involving his family. An upset fan base. Questions about his quarterback, his offense, his special teams.
It would be easy, in that kind of week, to blame the officials or the schedule or anything else. Brohm didn't.
"I think it's OK to be angry after the game," he said. "I think it's OK to be angry for 24 hours after that as well. And then from there you've got to identify the mistakes… Without question, the penalties stand out. Those fall on the head coach."
Later, he came back to the same theme: "We're not going to shy away from our mistakes and not talk about them. No, we're going to talk about them. We're going to go through them and we're going to analyze them. That's what we do on Sunday… and then it's about getting ready for the next opponent.
"I'm the one responsible for it and need to take the heat. So just like I've always done, you just put your head down and go to work."
That matters. Players hear it. Assistants hear it. Fans should hear it, too. Accountability at the top doesn't automatically fix anything. The flags don't fall off the stat sheet just because the head coach says the right words. But it does set the tone for what comes next.
If penalties are going to define this season, they'll do it one of two ways. Either we look back and say Louisville never stopped sabotaging itself, and that's the story of 2025. Or we look back and say this was the moment the Cardinals finally turned the mirror on themselves and changed.
The opponent this week is SMU. The real opponent is the enemy within.
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