Pat Kelsey, Louisville Using Exhibition Loss to Kansas as a 'Great Teaching Tool'

The Louisville men's basketball program is heading into the 2025-26 season with a lot of expectations. Ranked as the No. 11 team in the country and picked to finish second in the preseason ACC poll, the Cardinals not only have legitimate aspirations of winning the ACC, but contending for a Final Four and even a national title.

While those goals are still very much on the table considering the season has yet to officially start, we learned Friday night that Louisville has a few kinks to iron out first.

The Cardinals welcomed Kansas to the KFC Yum! Center for the increasingly-more-common ranked exhibition showdown, but were dealt a 90-82 loss by the No. 19 Jayhawks.

While the final result wasn't what second-year head coach Pat Kelsey wanted, he and his staff will use the game and the resulting film from it as a "great teaching tool" ahead of the start of the regular season.

"That’s what these early games and scrimmages are all about – finding things out about your team – the strengths and the weaknesses and things that need to be fixed," he said. "Playing a preseason game against a Division III team like we did last year, you don’t get the answers that you need. We have some tonight and we now have a great teaching tool that I am excited to dive into right away."

It was a game in which, for large parts of the night, Louisville struggled with efficiency on both ends of the floor. For starters, despite largely having good shot selection and hauling in 21 offensive rebounds, they shot just 33.3 percent from the field and were 11-of-38 on three-point tries. Additionally, the Cardinals had way too many unforced turnovers, coughing the ball up 20 times - including 13 times in the second half alone.

Defensively, UofL had their fair share of issues as well. Interior defense left a lot to be desired, as Kansas shot 20-of-35 inside the arc and had 34 points in the paint. Darryn Peterson, the Jayhawks' star freshman guard, put up 21 points in the first half before eventually finishing with 26.

"We were not being as disruptive as we needed to be and just allowing them to flow in their offense and allowing missed shots to dictate our defense - it’s stuff we’re going to clean up," guard Ryan Conwell said. "It’s just the beginning of something good, so we’ve just got to stay with it.”

But despite not putting together their best effort in the first half and trailing by 18 points at the break, Louisville's players didn't quit. In fact, they were able to get their deficit down to single digits with 2:25 left, but they simply ran out of time. Even though this game didn't count on Louisville's official record for the year, the players never hung their heads, and fought like it was a normal game.

"Halftime was awesome because before I even walked in there, I heard a ton of voices and I kind of stayed outside and listened a little bit," Kelsey said. "Those guys were saying everything I was going to say. The same thing happened after the game, when I walked in, they were all talking. I let those guys even continue to talk even when I was in the room and they said all the right things. We will have a great response today, I know those guys will learn from it.”

It's not the first time that a Kelsey-led team has ran into early adversity. In just his second game as the head coach of the Cardinals last season, Tennessee came into the KFC Yum! Center and dealt Louisville a humbling 77-55 defeat. That was part of a 6-5 start to the year, before Louisville found their footing and finished 27-8 in year one under Kelsey.

The difference here is that Louisville is still 0-0 for the 2025-26 season. Not to mention that they have another exhibition game - Oct. 28 against Bucknell - to warmup before game starts counting. Between returners knowing what it's like to face early adversity, as well as there being ample time to correct various issues, Louisville and their players are far from hitting the panic button.

"I mentioned to the team in the locker room, I know everybody else – Aly (Khalifa) and Kobe (Rodgers) and all the guys who were here last year – we talked about how that happened last year," guard/forward J'Vonne Hadley said. "We got punched early too – it happened last year. We’ll be alright. All we’ve got to do is learn, fix ourselves, look at ourselves in the mirror and we’ll be alright.”