A new college basketball season begins next week. For fans of the University of Louisville men’s team, it’s also a fresh start.
The Cardinals are one of the country's most popular and historically successful teams. But they’ve struggled to make recent March Madness tournaments and finished last in the Atlantic Coast Conference the past two years.
New head coach Pat Kelsey has won over many fans in the offseason. And with an almost entirely new roster, the Cardinals are expected to improve this season. But will they?
Mike Rutherford is the managing editor of the Louisville sports website Card Chronicle and hosts a daily sports radio show on WXVW-AM. He spoke with LPM’s Jacob Munoz about the stakes for this year’s team.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Mike, talk to me a little bit about the significance [of] the Louisville men's basketball program. We're in a college city. We have a lot of eyes on this team on the national scale. But what does it mean specifically for the city and for the residents and fans here?
I think I've always viewed the Louisville men's basketball program as sort of an extension of the city. And not everybody here is a Louisville fan. You do have a lot of Kentucky fans. You've got some transplants. But for the most part, you feel a different energy in the city, when U of L men's basketball is humming, when they’ve got it going.
I mean, I think it's akin to religion around here. You're born, and from before the time [when] you can really have conscious memories, it's sort of embedded in you. You know, we're a “Go Cards” family, or we’re a “Go Cats” family.
Can you tell me a little about the significance of the men's basketball team in Louisville when it comes to the school's future, [or] the city's future? Does this team have an outsized impact?
Through these lean years, Louisville basketball has remained the biggest revenue producer in college basketball, which is crazy. You look at the attendance, it's significantly down. You look at just the overall buzz, the people wearing Louisville stuff in the city the last couple of years, it's been significantly down. The fact that Louisville is still producing the amount of money that they have been for the school is remarkable.
And I know there have been a handful of stories written the last couple of years about downtown businesses specifically … you know, it's a Saturday night home game against Duke. We're expecting to have a ton of foot traffic both before and after the game, and it just hasn't been there the last couple of years.
The fans that were going to games weren't really celebrating it. You know, they're not meeting for drinks ahead of time, and they're certainly not celebrating after a 20-point loss to Florida State.
Can you explain what happened in those two years that led to this crashing down of the Louisville men's basketball program, in terms of its status [in] the sports world?
There was a groundswell amongst the fan base, first in 2018 when they ended up hiring [head coach] Chris Mack, from people who wanted Kenny Payne.
He's got all these ties on the recruiting trail. He was a successful assistant at Kentucky. He was part of a national championship-winning team here in 1986.
So it happens again when Chris Mack leaves the program in the middle of the season in 2022. People are like, “Kenny Payne's the guy. Never been a head coach before, but he's the guy.” And the unfortunate reality for Louisville was, he wasn't the guy.
He put together a staff that was not very good. He didn't get in the right players. And the results speak for themselves: he won four games his first year, [and] eight games his second year. And it got to a level that I didn't think Louisville basketball was capable of getting to, where you've got fans who are just disassociating themselves from the program.
Pat Kelsey was not a big-name hire for Louisville. And maybe there was a little bit of concern when the announcement was initially made, but now it seems that a lot of fans in the city are behind him.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it's been like since he's been hired, and what kind of coach is he expected to be in his first year here?
Kelsey pretty quickly comes in and sways a significant chunk of the fan base just with his energy. I've always said, [in] Louisville, it's not just enough to be a guy who knows Xs and O's, who can communicate with players, who has good relationships with his players. You have to be a basketball psycho. You have to be the right type of psychotic person to coach this job, because it's 365 days a year.
He assembled a roster pretty quickly that's loaded with talented players who have won at high levels at other programs. He's, I think, endeared himself to the fan base by talking about how much this job means to him, how he's got his dream job, this is what you dream about when you get into the coaching profession.
And so I think everything that Pat Kelsey has done over the last seven months has gone a long way towards building back the energy around the program that Louisville fans are used to. Now, if he doesn't win, none of it means anything. But for right now, there's more momentum around the program than there has been at any point in the last five years, I’d say.
As the regular season begins to kick off soon, what is the expectation for this team? Are they expected to beat Kentucky? Are they expected to get into the tournament?
They're playing a bunch of really, really good teams before the calendar flips to 2025. So Louisville fans, I think, will know what to expect pretty early on from this team as far as how good they can be.
This team is capable of, I think, winning around 20 games and being an NCAA tournament team. I'm not guaranteeing that they're going to get there, but I think that they're fully capable. And just having that hope is enough for Louisville fans right now, because the last two years, you went into both seasons knowing you weren't going to be in the NCAA Tournament. It was only a question of, how bad is this going to be?
Knowing that there's hope right now, that Pat Kelsey can be the guy, not just this year, but the man who, five years from now, has Louisville back to where the program expects to be, competing for championships, is thrilling for fans right now. And it's not always going to be where the bar is. Eventually, people are going to expect more. But for right now, it's enough.
