Louisville's fall was fascinating. The road back will be interesting, too

In the hallway of the Louisville football complex on Wednesday, a whiteboard sat on the floor in front of the weight room. It read, at the top, “CAN’T GET RIGHT.” There were two columns marked “Player” and “Violation.”

And at the bottom, “LITTLE THINGS MAKE THE BIG THINGS HAPPEN.”

New coach Scott Satterfield has talked about his “culture change” since the day he arrived on campus. “Culture” talk can seem hollow in February, before the games are played. But that whiteboard provides some tangible evidence. The change has already started.

The idea was that accountability, discipline and standards will take priority over opponent prep, zone-blocking schemes and two-minute offense scripts.

A long rebuilding process awaits, and the work really begins Monday, when Satterfield holds his first Louisville spring practice.

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In Louisville, in the ACC and throughout the country, one of the stories of 2018 was the collapse of Bobby Petrino’s football program. Fans, reporters and analysts all wondered: 9-4, 8-5, 9-4, 8-5 ... 2-10? What happened?

Everyone had their theories, and there was no single answer. It was a fascinating study in how everything can go wrong.

Now Louisville must pick up the pieces. And the road back to the top? That’ll be all the more interesting.

Little things

“Little things make the big things happen.” In the lengthy analysis of how Louisville imploded in 2018, start there.

The Cardinals stopped doing the little things well. They lost top-level coaches and didn’t replace them with the same quality. They slacked in subtle areas of player development. Even the play calling dipped, with that ill-fated pass against Florida State last September.

In short, what stopped were all things that don’t matter much when there’s a Heisman Trophy winner around and mean everything when there isn’t.

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That’s what makes this rebuilding project so intriguing: There’s a new offense, a new defense and no Heisman winner walking through that door. The next good Louisville football team will not remotely resemble the last one.

Satterfield will build this team as he did the excellent Appalachian State program over the last six years. At their best, the Cardinals, like the Mountaineers, will pound the ball in the running game, present difficult looks on the defensive front and not turn the ball over.

Swift changes are in order. It was telling last November that a handful of new team rules in the transition from Petrino to interim head coach Lorenzo Ward generated seven suspensions in the last two games for infractions such as showing up late to team obligations.

Standards of that nature have already taken shape in 2019.

“Accountability,” junior safety TreSean Smith began after a workout last month. “(The coaching staff) changed a lot of things around to where you have to be accountable for everything that you do. You’re not late to anything. You’re at everything on time, five minutes before. They show no leniency to anyone. So that’s a good thing.”

Incoming graduate transfer Ean Pfeifer said Wednesday that his host on his official visit to Satterfield’s new program was fifth-year senior punter Mason King, who said one player recently arrived two minutes late for a team workout. The result? One hundred up-downs for everyone on the defense.

Patience

In an interview the week he was hired, Satterfield posited a utopia, a dream scenario for every coach.

“I think if you were just kind of in a bubble and nobody really could look at you, and you had time to really do it right, a couple years really just to do it right, and then the product that you put out there, all of a sudden it shows up,” Satterfield said. “Two years later, (if) nobody saw it, they’d be like, ‘That’s awesome.’

“But it’s difficult when you’re going through it. It’s going to be difficult for our players, it’s going to be difficult for our fans probably. But every now and again, you got to see that glimpse of light, and people will be like, ‘OK, yeah, that’s great.’”

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Satterfield is fond of recalling that his first team at Appalachian State was 4-8, and his second team started 1-5. Satterfield was 5-13 and starting to worry about his job security. Then the Mountaineers visited Troy and rolled. They did not lose the rest of that season.

They lost eight of their first 12, then five of their next six and then — after two years of building — won 47 of their next 58. That fact will bear repeating throughout next season, and perhaps beyond.

Winning takes time. By the end of September last year, it became clear in retrospect that the season was doomed when Bobby Petrino proclaimed that Louisville’s offense would be better in 2018 than in 2017. It was never going to be. The expectation just made life harder on everyone.

The Cardinals won’t get back there overnight. As Satterfield takes the helm, the little improvements will have to be building blocks, and the inevitable roadblocks will come.

“I think just us coming in with a new culture, a new lots of things, it’s going to be new for them,” Satterfield said. “And I think that’s going to be exciting initially. But then it’s going to be a lot of hard work. There are going to be some setbacks. There’ll probably be some that don’t want to buy in. We’ll go through some of that.”

The initial excitement came in December and January. Now comes that hard work.

Jake Lourim: 502-582-4168; jlourim@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @jakelourim. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/jakel.