Oops: Louisville forgot to reload the secondary

By Darrell Laurant  |   Wednesday, September 26, 2007  |  Comments( 0 )

Louisville Cardinals
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OK, it's now official -- for the time being, at least, the University of Louisville football team is defenseless.

For a while this season, Cardinal supporters were in denial. Sure, Middle Tennessee scored 42 points on UL in the second game of the season, but that was in a relative blowout. And then Kentucky beat the Cardinals 40-34, but that was an old rivalry, and UK was fired up.

But then came Syracuse, which entered Saturday's game at Papa John's Stadium ranked second to last nationally in offense among Division I-A teams. The Orange offensive line was said to have the resilience of a taco shell. Sophomore quarterback Andrew Robinson had been knocked down more times than a Hollywood stunt man, prompting the headline in a Syracuse newspaper: "Vertical passing game hurt by horizontal quarterback." Even worse, Syracuse had absolutely no running game.

The Orange were a joke, supposedly. But they were the ones who left the field laughing after a 38-35 upset victory.

Syracuse coach Greg Robinson made no secret of his game plan going in. To put it in a nutshell, it went something like this: "We might as well throw the ball deep, because what have we got to lose?"

So on the first play from scrimmage against Louisville, Andrew Robinson cranked it up and hurled a bomb to Taj Smith, who caught it. The play went for 79 yards and a touchdown.

After the first three games, Robinson was one of the bottom feeders in the national quarterback statistics. On Saturday, Steve Kragthorpe's team made him look like the reissue of a former Louisville quarterback -- Johnny Unitas.

Over his first three games, Robinson had 486 yards passing. Against Louisville, he totaled 432 and four touchdowns. Besides the 79-yarder to Smith, he completed passes of 60, 48 and 42 yards.

"We can't let them throw over our heads," Kragthorpe said.

He also said something else after that game that was a bit unbelievable. When he took the job as Bobby Petrino's replacement, he stated, "I didn't know about the relative lack of depth and inexperience on the defensive side of the ball."

Come on. A coach is going to uproot his family and stake the rest of a career on a new job, and he doesn't even check the depth chart of his new team? He couldn't see that 2006 secondary starters William Gay, Gavin Smart and Brandon Sharp were leaving?

The sad fact is, Louisville has not yet reached the plateau of a team that "reloads," like a Florida or a Texas. Thus far this year, the secondary is an empty chamber. Even worse, starting cornerback Latarrius Thomas went down with a knee injury against Middle Tennessee.

Kragthorpe and his defensive coaches are scrambling to implement damage control, which included starting some younger players against Syracuse. (That worked well, didn't it?). Chances are things will get better in a few weeks.

Generally speaking, fans of an underachieving team tend to blame the quarterback, but that's a little hard to do in this case. Louisville's Brian Brohm threw for 555 yards and four touchdowns against Syracuse. In a loss!

What a bum.
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