Florida State Football: Can Noles earn first ACC win over Louisville?

Florida State football looks to secure its third win of the season over Louisville after a turnover-filled game against Northern Illinois.

To say that both of these teams have been underwhelming this season would be an understatement.

Florida State opened up the year with a convincing loss to Virginia Tech in which it allowed 14 tackles for loss and five sacks and were only able to muster up three points. They followed that up by narrowly escaping Stanford — correction, Samford (yea, you read that right) at home before getting throttled by Syracuse.

Cam Akers has somehow managed to rush for four yards a carry behind a dreadful offensive line and Deondre Francois has over 1,000 yards passing in the first four games. The offensive line has underperformed all season long by allowing 12 sacks to Virginia Tech, Samford, Syracuse and Northern Illinois.

Defensively, they’ve done really well stopping the run. Syracuse ran the ball a total of 57 times in their matchup against Florida State and the Noles held them under four yards per carry while Virginia Tech was held under three yards per carry in Week 1.

Their pass defense hasn’t had as much success with 279 yards allowed on average to opposing quarterbacks and only have four turnovers on the season thus far. Florida State is far from the Defensive Back U that they were with guys like Jalen Ramsey and Derwin James over the past several years.

Louisville came into the season with a lot of optimism on offense despite losing a video game-esque player in Lamar Jackson. Jawon Pass was going to step in and give the strong Louisville receiving corps a more accurate passer and their spring game gave us a taste of what should’ve been.

Alas, Louisville has fallen from a third-ranked offense that averaged 544.9 yards per game with 38 points on average to the 125th ranked offense with 284.3 yards per game and a mere 17 points per game. Pass and Malik Cunningham are currently in a battle for the starting job and the most concerning thing for Louisville’s football program is that neither has created separation from the other.

Defensively, the Cardinals look good against the pass on paper. They’ve allowed an average of 197.8 yards over their first four games to opposing quarterbacks. The one downfall to this statistic is that Tua Tagovailoa played very sparingly after opening up the game going 12-for-14 for 227 yards and two touchdowns.

Against Bryce Perkins of Virginia, they allowed him 197 passing yards for a pair of scores which bodes better for the level of competition they have this week. Louisville has only six sacks on the season and will have to secure more this week if they expect to come out on top.

Which team can do enough to reach their third win of the season?

Date: Saturday, Sept. 29
Time: 3:30 p.m. ET
Location: Louisville, Ky.
Venue: Cardinal Stadium
TV: ESPN 2
LiveStream: WatchESPN or FuboTV

Players to Watch

Florida State

• RB, Cam Akers
• QB, Deondre Francois
• DT, Demarcus Christmas
• WRs, Keith Gavin and Tamorrion Terry
• DE, Bryan Burns

Louisville

• QBs, Malik Cunningham and Jawon Pass
• WRs, Jaylen Smith, Dez Fitzpatrick, Seth Dawkins
• LB/DE, Tabarious Peterson
• S, Dee Smith

Keys To Victory

Florida State’s offensive line just needs to do something to get Cam Akers going. Louisville’s leading tackler right now is safety Dee Smith which means that most of these runners are getting into the second level of the defense with ease and this is proven with Louisville’s 192 rushing yards allowed per game over the 2018 season.

Muster up enough of a blocking scheme to get Akers moving in the correct direction and the rest will take care of itself.

Louisville must find a quarterback that can move the ball. Pass supposedly has the better arm but has more interceptions as he does touchdowns (2-to-5) while also having a 50 percent completion rate. Cunningham is throwing for 64 percent but his average attempt is less than six yards upfield.

If Louisville wants to win, it will need to be able to move the ball through the air because the ground just isn’t an option this week. Also, Tabarious Peterson is off to a great start as a pass rusher and needs to really get after Francois and force him to turn the ball over.

Betting Odds

Odds courtesy of OddsShark

Points Spread: Florida State -6.5
Over/Under: 46

Prediction

This one is going to be ugly. Florida State will have more plays that go for negative yards than it’s proud of but it won’t matter in the end because Louisville still won’t have a quarterback at the conclusion of the fourth quarter and I’m not sure that they can really score against more talented football teams.

Final Score: Florida State 20, Louisville 13