Know Your Foe: Against U of L, UK will seek to salvage something from a lost season
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Preview: Louisville at Kentucky football
Click below to read more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s preview coverage ahead of Saturday’s Kentucky-Louisville Governor’s Cup football rivalry game at Kroger Field.
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Scouting Kentucky football’s next opponent, the Louisville Cardinals:
Game details
Kentucky (4-7, 1-7 SEC) will play intrastate-rival Louisville (7-4, 5-3 ACC) on Saturday, Nov. 30, at Kroger Field (seating capacity of some 61,000) on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
The game will kick off at noon (EST) and will be telecast by the SEC Network.
Coach Jeff Brohm’s Cardinals defeated ACC rival Pittsburgh on Saturday.
History and trends
Kentucky leads the all-time series with Louisville 20-15.
The Wildcats have won the past five meetings with the Cardinals and six of the last seven.
UK coach Mark Stoops is 6-4 against Louisville.
Cardinals head man Jeff Brohm is 0-1 vs. Kentucky.
There has traditionally not been much of a home-field advantage in the modern Governor’s Cup football rivalry.
In the modern (since 1994) UK-U of L series, the Cardinals are 10-6 against the Wildcats in Lexington.
Conversely, the Cats are 8-5 (in on-the-field results) vs. the Cards in The Ville.
Neither Kentucky nor Louisville has been especially good against power conference competition recently.
The Wildcats are 3-13 in their last 16 games against power conference foes. U of L is 5-7 in its last 12 such games.
Most recent meeting
Ray Davis scored three touchdowns, J.J. Weaver recovered two second-half fumbles and Barion Brown returned a kickoff for a TD to spark Kentucky to a come-from-behind, 38-31 upset of No. 9 Louisville at L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium.
UK trailed by 10 points on two different occasions in the third quarter but rallied behind Brown, Weaver and Davis to beat the Cardinals for the fifth consecutive time.
The game was played against a backdrop of national media reports that UK coach Mark Stoops would be departing after the contest to become the new head man at Texas A&M.
Ultimately, that did not happen.
Davis scored the game-winning touchdown on a 37-yard run with 1:02 left.
Kentucky safety Jordan Lovett then sent a pro-U of L crowd of 59,225 home in silence by intercepting a Jack Plummer pass in the UK end zone to seal the Wildcats’ victory with two seconds left.
A product of Louisville’s Moore High School, UK’s Weaver was named winner of the Howard Schnellenberger MVP Award after making eight tackles, recovering two fumbles that both led to Kentucky scores and recording a QB sack.
Pride of the program
It would take an extraordinary football player to dethrone legendary NFL quarterback Johnny Unitas as the pride of the University of Louisville football program — but Lamar Jackson cleared that bar.
In an epic three seasons (2015 through 2017) playing QB for U of L, Jackson redefined the expectations for his position with his breathtaking playmaking.
For his Louisville career, the 6-foot-3, 211-pound Jackson threw for 9,043 yards and 69 touchdowns and ran for 4,132 yards and 50 TDs.
As a sophomore in 2016, Jackson, a product of Pompano Beach, Florida, made commonwealth of Kentucky sports history when he became the first player playing for a university in our state to win the Heisman Trophy.
The following season, as a junior, Jackson finished third in the Heisman voting.
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In 2018, Jackson became a first-round draft pick of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.
During a professional football career that is ongoing, Jackson has already twice won the NFL MVP Award (in 2019 and 2023) and has been named to the Pro Bowl three times.
Interestingly, Jackson has so far spent his entire NFL career with Baltimore. That is the same city where Unitas, who quarterbacked U of L from 1051-54, achieved his NFL greatness.
Three things to know
1. Last year’s upset loss to Kentucky in the Governor’s Cup was out of character for Jeff Brohm as a rivalry coach.
In his three seasons (2014 through 2016) as Western Kentucky coach, Brohm went 2-1 vs. WKU’s archrival, Middle Tennessee State.
During his six years (2017 through 2022) as Purdue head man, Brohm went 4-1 vs. Indiana in the “Old Oaken Bucket” rivalry. (The teams did not play during the coronavirus-impacted 2020 season).
In terms of Brohm’s standing with the Louisville fan base, it is hard to overstate how important it is for the coach to snap U of L’s five-game losing streak to UK in a season in which the Wildcats are already guaranteed to have a losing season.
2. As is typical of a Brohm-coached team, Louisville has a statistically impressive offense. Going into Saturday’s game with Pittsburgh, U of L was 15th in the FBS in points a game (36.1), 15th in passing yards a game (284.8) and 20th in total yards a game (447.8).
3. Louisville has not been especially solid in “the little things.”
The Cardinals entered the Pittsburgh game at minus-two in turnover margin, tied for 79th in the FBS (which was still better than Kentucky, which was minus-3 entering the Wildcats game at Texas).
U of L special teams have struggled. The Cards have used two punters, but entered the Pitt contest averaging only 40.21 yards a punt.
Meanwhile, Louisville place-kicker Brock Travelstead has missed seven of his 20 field goal tries.
This story was originally published November 25, 2024 at 7:00 AM.
