The 2023 season marked the start of a new era for the Louisville football program. Scott Satterfield left for Cincinnati, with Jeff Brohm leaving Purdue to take over as the head coach of his alma mater.
Despite ending with a three-game losing streak, the 2023 campaign for the Cardinals was still a highly successful one. Louisville went 10-4 overall, including a 7-1 mark in Atlantic Coast Conference play to clinch their first ever berth in the ACC Championship Game.
Even the natural roster attrition that comes with graduation, the transfer portal and the NFL Draft, Louisville is in line to have another talented roster in 2024. The Cardinals are bringing in the No. 1 portal class in college football, return several impact playmakers from last season, and inked the No. 31 high school recruiting class in the cycle.
That all being said, how well will Louisville perform in year two of the Jeff Brohm era? It is a little early to tell, considering spring practice hasn't even started yet and there is another transfer window on the horizon, but we already have some idea thanks to the predictive college football metric SP+.
SP+, according to its creator Bill Connelly of ESPN, is a "tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency". He has made several tweaks to it over the years since creating it in 2008 while at Football Outsiders, but the current iteration takes into account three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.
Last week, Connelly released his early 2023 preseason SP+ projections. With a rating of 11.4, Louisville is ranked No. 24 out of 134 FBS teams.
Unsurprisingly given their success on that side of the ball last season, the metric is very high on the defensive side of the ball for the Cardinals, giving it a rating of 19.1, or 21st in FBS. Conversely, SP+ is not as big of a fan of the offensive side of things even with the influx of transfer talent, giving it a rating of 30.5, or 44th in FBS.
Using SP+, we can plug in the rating from each team on Louisville's schedule and take a deep dive into how the 2024 season might transpire. We can figure out the win percentage in each game (accounting for home vs. away), the expected wins mark at the end of the season, as well as the statistical likelihood of every outcome during and concluding the season.
| Opponent | Proj. SP+ | Off. SP+ | Def. SP+ |
|---|---|---|---|
Austin Peay |
-20 (N/A) |
N/A |
N/A |
Jacksonville State |
-4.0 (75th) |
22.9 (86th) |
27.0 (54th) |
Georgia Tech |
-1.1 (60th) |
32.4 (35th) |
33.4 (101) |
Notre Dame |
24.1 (9th) |
39.8 (10th) |
15.7 (9th) |
SMU |
9.9 (27th) |
35.0 (24th) |
25.1 (46th) |
Virginia |
-5.8 (81st) |
25.5 (71st) |
31.3 (84th) |
Miami |
12.3 (21st) |
36.2 (17th) |
23.9 (38th) |
Boston College |
-4.7 (76th) |
25.7 (67th) |
30.5 (79th) |
Clemson |
18.0 (16th) |
36.6 (15th) |
18.6 (20th) |
Stanford |
-8.7 (94th) |
25.1 (76th) |
33.8 (106th) |
Pitt |
-3.0 (70th) |
22.6 (89th) |
25.6 (48th) |
Kentucky |
5.6 (40th) |
29.5 (51st) |
23.9 (37th) |
SP+ is already pretty high on Louisville. Despite the Cardinals having a slightly tougher schedule than they had last season, the metric still paints an optimistic picture.
The Cardinals will play just three teams that boast a higher SP+ rating - Notre Dame, Miami and Clemson - and have a win probability of over 50.0 percent in 10 of their 12 regular season games. Louisville is a decisive underdog in their road games at Notre Dame and Clemson, are slight favorites against SMU, Miami and Kentucky, and are clear favorites in every other game.
Louisville has an expected wins mark of 8.12, and they have a 27.66 percent chance to finish the season with eight wins, the highest out of any other win mark. For all intents and purposes, as of right now, SP+ is projecting the Cardinals to go 8-4 in 2024. However, based on pure game-by-game win percentages, their ceiling could be closer to 10 wins.
A lot can happen between now and Aug. 31 when Louisville host Austin Peay to kick off the season. But for the time being, it seems that Louisville is potentially shaping up to have another successful campaign under Brohm.
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