LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Louisville is dancing again. And this time, the Cardinals didn’t have to wait years to get back.
For the first time in a decade, Louisville men’s basketball is headed to the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back seasons.
Louisville will be heading north to Buffalo, New York, on Thursday in the East Region, where they will face former Conference USA and American Athletic Conference foe South Florida (25-8), the No. 11 seed. The Bulls, AAC champions, have won 12 straight games. The winner will get the winner of No. 3 seed Michigan State and North Dakota State.
That alone marks another step in the program’s climb back toward national relevance. But Louisville will head into the tournament with a larger goal still out in front of it: the program’s first NCAA Tournament victory since the departure of Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino.
Kelsey, meanwhile, is seeking his first NCAA Tournament win as a head coach, though most of his previous bids came at mid-major stops, where his teams entered March facing long odds and high seeds.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
"I think our team is in a great place, and I'm excited about what's to come," Kelsey said after Louisville’s ACC Tournament loss to Miami.
The Cardinals take a 23-10 record into the tournament, with a résumé strong enough to earn at-large security well before Selection Sunday. Louisville posted eight Quad 1 wins in the NCAA’s NET ratings and challenged itself with one an ambitious schedule, facing road games at Tennessee and Arkansas, neutral-site matchups with Cincinnati and Indiana, and a February trip to Baylor.
A year ago, Kelsey engineered one of the nation’s biggest turnarounds, guiding Louisville to 27 wins, a second-place ACC finish and conference coach of the year honors before the Cardinals fell to Creighton in an 8-9 first-round matchup in their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2019.
This season brought bigger expectations and, at times, bigger flashes. Louisville was picked second in the ACC in the preseason and opened the year ranked No. 11 in the Associated Press poll. The Cardinals rose as high as No. 6 after beating rival Kentucky on Nov. 11 and opened the season with seven straight wins.
But the season also tested them.
Health remains the biggest question Louisville carries into the bracket. Freshman point guard Mikel Brown, who returned from a back issue that sidelined him for eight games and then averaged 29.5 points over a five-game stretch, has missed the past four games because of a recurrence of those problems.
Kelsey said Brown sat out of the ACC Tournament "with the goal of having him 100 percent for the NCAA Tournament."
Brown’s importance is difficult to overstate. He averaged 18.2 points per game this season and tied a Louisville men's single-game scoring record when he poured in 45 points against North Carolina State. Over his last 10 games, Brown averaged 25.5 points per contest, giving Louisville a level of offensive creation that few teams in the field can match when he is healthy.
Even without him, Louisville has shown balance.
Senior transfer Ryan Conwell, who arrived from Xavier, led the Cardinals in scoring at 18.7 points per game and gave them a reliable scoring threat all season. J’Vonne Hadley has been one of the team’s steadiest pieces, and over Louisville’s past 10 games has played some of his best basketball, averaging 15 points while shooting 64.5% from two-point range and 55.2% from three. Ryan McKneely also finished the regular season in double figures at 10.6 points per game.
The numbers suggest Louisville, with good shooting, could be a dangerous tournament team. The Cardinals entered Selection Sunday ranked No. 20 nationally in adjusted offensive efficiency and No. 25 in adjusted defensive efficiency in Ken Pomeroy’s metrics, making them one of only nine teams in the country ranked in the top 25 in both categories.
Louisville leans heavily on the three-point shot, ranking among the national leaders in percentage of attempts from beyond the arc. But the Cardinals have also been highly efficient inside the line, in part because they have generally avoided settling for low-value midrange shots and instead hunted threes, layups and finishes at the rim.
Where Louisville has been vulnerable is in dealing with size and physicality around the basket. The Cardinals do not have a traditional rim protector, and over the final stretch of the season they worked to adjust to the more rugged style that often defines March basketball.
That, Kelsey said, is not a surprise. It is the reality of the tournament.
"All the really good teams in the country are tough and physical," he said. "College basketball, at the top, it's football. It really is. We know the teams that we're going to have to beat to advance in the NCAA Tournament are going to be tough and physical and nasty, but so are the Cardinals."
That will be the question now.
Louisville has rebuilt its standing. It has restored expectations. It has returned to the bracket in consecutive seasons for the first time in 10 years.
The next step is the one this program has been chasing for even longer: winning once it gets there.
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