Louisville’s BCS Title Hopes Trace Back to Sugar Bowl Win

Louisville football has already celebrated its most important win of the year before the 2013 season even starts. Mandatory Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Strange as it might sound, Louisville doesn’t have to worry about its most important game in 2013.

The Cardinals already won that game convincingly, pounding No. 3 Florida, 33-23, in the Sugar Bowl.

Discussion following Louisville’s victory – which lingered throughout the summer – put Charlie Strong’s program in the best position to make a serious move this year.

Much in the same way a presidential candidate gains credibility simply by being on stage with the incumbent, Louisville being a team talked about in the national championship conversation for several months makes it a very real threat for the title game this year.

That QB Teddy Bridgewater emerged as a national star that night certainly doesn’t hurt. His one-night performance put him in offseason discussion as both a potential Heisman Trophy winner and the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft when he declares.

Thus the Cardinals have a marketable superstar as the face of the program –a player that can help drive ratings.

Amazing, isn’t it, what one game can do to the public perception of a team?

Remember, this is a Louisville program that Syracuse drubbed in November. The same Louisville team lost to hapless UConn. At home. It took three-point wins for the Cardinals to escape with home victories over Cincinnati and Rutgers as well.

Yet, in a society that cares only about what it saw most recently, the win over Florida somehow erased those facts from memory.

As a result, simply by having the Sugar Bowl trophy inside team facilities, Louisville opens this season inside the top 10.

What was in the game for Florida? Well, the Gators open inside the top 10 as well – one spot behind the Cardinals.

Still, the trap to avoid here is that Florida somehow didn’t care about the Sugar Bowl. That’s the easy excuse to fall into – that the mighty Gators of the SEC couldn’t have possibly lost to a team from the Big East, for crying out loud, if they wanted to win.

What? Will Muschamp wanted his team to allow Missouri Louisiana-Lafayette to scare his home crowds into half-hungover tizzies in November, too?

At the same time – and whether it’s fair or not – the Sugar Bowl meant a lot more to Louisville than it did to Florida because of what it meant for the 2013 season.

That’s not to say that Florida didn’t want to win. It’s not to say the Gators were improperly prepared or motivated.

It’s simply to say that Florida plays in the meritocracy that is the SEC while Louisville is stuck in a league where style points carry weight. A lot of weight – because strength of schedule carries none.

Even if the Gators weren’t ranked to start the season, if they lost one game in 2013, they would have had a shot at the BCS National Championship Game. Because they play in the SEC – the 1927 Yankees of college football conferences.

Take away the tie-breaker Louisville held over Rutgers, Cincinnati and Syracuse last year and the Cardinals wouldn’t have even played in the Sugar Bowl. They would instead be viewed as an AAC favorite and a team worth voting in the top-20.

(One discussion worth reviewing here would be the validity of preseason polls, which are nothing more than guesses to which stubborn voters too often marry themselves.)

The AAC watched more teams leave during the offseason. Syracuse and Pittsburgh are now gone. In their place, noted powerhouses Houston, SMU, Temple, UCF and Memphis arrive.

In other words, an already bad league managed to get worse over summer vacation.

Normally being attached to such a league would relegate the Cardinals to the wait-and-see level previously known by Utah, Boise State and TCU when those programs were members of the WAC and Mountain West.

Louisville still isn’t likely to make the BCS National Championship Game if, say, teams from the Big Ten and ACC go undefeated even if the Cardinals do as well.

It is, however, now in the conversation for the game even against a one-loss SEC team.

For the record, Louisville’s 2013 schedule features a toughest non-conference bout at Kentucky – which failed to win a league game last season – and what could be an all-or-nothing game at Cincinnati on Dec. 5.

If the Cardinals win that one – and the 11 before them – they will be in the national championship conversation.

And it will have had more to do with what Louisville did inside the Superdome than what it did throughout the 2013 season.