Between Saturday’s white lines, Louisville-Western Kentucky was a real football game
For a little over three hours on Saturday night before an announced crowd of 11,179 inside Cardinal Stadium, everything was right with the world.
“Everybody’s safe place,” Scott Satterfield called it.
With one exception.
“The mask is the only thing that is awful,” said the Louisville football coach of adhering to the facial covering requirement. “That’s not breaking news.”
They played football Saturday night in River City. College football. FBS football. (Better known as Division I-A football.) It was the first such tilt of this 2020 pandemic season inside the commonwealth. There was rain — off and on. There were lots of empty red seats, as mandated by the 20 percent capacity order. There were COVID-19 protocols. One example: Red plastic cups taped over the buttons on the water fountains to render them inoperable.
There were only 20 assigned seats in the Cardinal Stadium press box, which usually welcomes at least three times that number. Elbow room was plentiful. We conducted our postgame interviews from our press box seat, via video conference through Microsoft Teams. We were banned from our Usain Bolt-style sprints to the locker room after the final horn to gather information to meet an impossible deadline. Instead, we were tasked with something far and away more difficult — remembering to unmute our microphones before asking a coach or player a question.
Oh yeah, the actual game. Louisville beat Western Kentucky, 35-21. Pushing the start of the season back a week apparently did not give the Cardinals adequate time to work on special teams. First possession, U of L fumbled away a punt snap at its own 1-yard line, setting up WKU’s first score. Later, the Cards had a punt blocked with the visiting Hilltoppers recovering at the 5-yard line to set up their second score. Other than that, Louisville looked good.
Quarterback Micale Cunningham had a career night passing the football, completing 19 of 34 passes for 343 yards and three touchdowns. The junior ran for a fourth. He hit on long balls of 63 and 48 yards to newcomer Braden Smith, an excellent addition from junior college. And wide-out Dez Fitzpatrick snatched away a would-be Western interception and turned it into a 70-yard score.
“Dez bailed me out on that one, that’s all I’m going to say,” Cunningham said.
“It was good to see those big plays,” Satterfield said.
In 2019, a big-play Louisville offense was often undercut by a Louisville defense that gave up too many big plays. Despite an 8-5 record, U of L ranked 102nd nationally in total defense. Throw out Saturday’s punt problems, and the Cardinals defense allowed just seven points and 248 total yards, nearly 200 yards fewer than last season’s 439.9 yards per game average. Not a bad start.
And Western is no pushover. The Toppers finished 9-4 last year under first-year head coach Ty “C-USA Coach of the Year” Helton. They returned nine starters on a defense that ranked 24th in yards allowed. WKU got a stellar Saturday from Omari Alexander, a former Eastern Kentucky Colonel, who recovered the fumbled punt, was responsible for the blocked punt and later intercepted a Cunningham pass.
New WKU quarterback Tyrell Pigrome, a grad transfer from Maryland, struggled throwing the football, completing just 10 of 23 passes for 129 yards. But “Piggy T” was an effective runner, especially as the night progressed. At 5-foot-10, and wearing uniform number 1, Pigrome looked sort of like Kyler Murray. Without the Heisman Trophy, of course.
You could make the case the Saturday night experience felt sort of similar to a real college football game. Give the U of L crowd credit. Small in number, while also wet, it made ample noise. The presence of the U of L band helped. And if you just concentrated on what was happening between the white lines, while also blocking out all your health concerns, Saturday was all a college football fan could have asked for in these scary times.
“Once you kick the ball off, it’s football,” Satterfield said. “It was fun just to go out there and compete.”
Next games
Liberty at Western Kentucky
Noon (EDT) Saturday (ESPNU)
Miami at Louisville
7:30 p.m. Saturday (ABC-36)
