With Rutgers’ loss to West Virginia, the Louisville Cardinals will head to their first BCS bowl in school history by virtue of a tiebreaker (the Cardinals beat West Virginia and Rutgers lost to West Virginia a few minutes ago in a classic thriller in Morgantown).
In addition to the Cardinals, the Oklahoma Sooners will punch their tickets to the BCS by winning the Big 12 championship over Nebraska this evening.
So start the debating of who will face the Ohio State Buckeyes in Glendale.
This is the eighth meeting between the two schools, West Virginia and Louisville has played each other since 1984 (the year of my birth) and has won six of the seven previous meetings between the two schools.
The game tonight marks the first time in the history of Big East football that two teams other than Virginia Tech or Miami has played each other with top 5 rankings.
Louisville fans are “blacking out” Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium for tonight’s game, which should be a treat to see on television.
I will be filing game reports from tonight’s game as I follow it on television and Yahoo! Gamechannel.
More than likely Kasi will be online for me to talk to.
And probably about some things that will not be mentioned in this blog.
Ten years ago, when I was in sixth grade, I found out that Louisville, our despised rival to the northeast, had a football team.
Up to that point, the only Louisville team that anyone in Memphis detested was Denny Crum’s boys, who were in a lull of sorts after spending so many years at the top in the world of college basketball.
Those Cardinal hoops squads had players like Dejuan Wheat who sputtered the Red and White to the Big Dance every season and got rightfully bounced in the second round by some superpower like Kansas or North Carolina.
Or even the burgenoning power in Oxford, Ole Miss.
The football team, from what I discovered in the fall of 1996, was nothing more than what it was then at the University of Memphis, a complete joke of a program.
In 1997, the Cardinals finished 1-10 and got rid of Ron Cooper and brought into the Falls City a cowboy by the name of John L. Smith.
And resurrected a program that up to that point, was known for having a quarterback by the name of Johnny Unitas as one of their alums and a coach by the name of Lee Corso, who coached there during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
From then on, the Cardinals were on the same path as the Tigers would be on five years later, going to five straight bowls from 1998 to 2002, when John L. left the University of Louisville for Michigan State University.
During a bowl game.
Of course, the people in the Falls City became blessed with a guy named Bobby Petrino and Petrino brought the Cardinals to national prominence.
And to the point where tonight, the University of Louisville will be playing in one of the biggest games in the school’s football history.
A sidebar to this is that from the stuff I read in the Louisville Courier-Journal about the aftermath of John L.’s firing from Michigan State this morning, some of the people in the Falls City are still laughing their asses off at the job he did at Michigan State.
Not one mention of John L.’s name is in any of the columns that I’ve read in the Courier-Journal, which is a very sad thing for a guy who elevated that program from being a fundraiser for the basketball team into a national power.
Okay, if I was a Louisville fan (which I’m not, but almost went there), I would be pissed at the way the guy left.
But to look at what that program was when I was growing up, it should be safe to say that the people of Louisville should line up one by one on the banks of the Ohio River, bend down before John L. Smith and kiss his ring.
Because if it weren’t for him, Louisville would be just like the afterthought programs at Duke/North Carolina/Vanderbilt (sorry, Kasi) /Kansas/Indiana/Maryland (10 years ago)/Memphis (what it was before Tommy West got there)/Utah/and any other afterthought college football program.
So, Louisville, enjoy tonight.
It’s your time to shine in the spotlight.
And for the next few weeks, be a Spartan fan and root for the guy that taught the Cardinals how to prepare for the big time world of college football.
It’ll be good for the heart.
