The University of Louisville took care of business Saturday, rolling past Georgia Tech 44-17 and keeping itself right in the thick of the ACC race.
That result matters far beyond one win. Louisville remains alive for the ACC title game, and by extension the College Football Playoff conversation, as the conference’s late-season picture tightens up around Louisville, Southern Methodist and Wake Forest.
Duke is still hanging around, too, with a finish at Wake Forest that could scramble everything. Last year’s tiebreaker setup has changed, and the league’s new rule says that when head-to-head results can’t sort out tied teams, the program with the strongest overall body of work gets the shot at the ACC Championship and the conference’s automatic qualifier to the College Football Playoff.
Wake Forest is the only one of the group currently ranked, so if the Demon Deacons lose to SMU next week, the whole thing gets even murkier. If that happens, good luck making sense of it all. For now, the only reasonable conclusion is that hope is still alive in Louisville and a few other places around the league.
On the field, there wasn’t much doubt once the Cardinals settled in. Louisville absorbed an early fumble on a punt and a roughing-the-punter penalty that gave Georgia Tech a second chance on its opening series, and the Yellow Jackets cashed it in for three points. After that, the game tilted hard and stayed that way.
Brent Key rotated quarterbacks, which never tends to signal smooth sailing. When asked about that situation by ACC Network’s sideline reporter, the coach offered a blunt answer about needing more than three-and-outs, then delivered the kind of line that says plenty without saying much at all: “Well, they’re both playing.”
Louisville was up 27-10 at halftime and, even after Tech added a late score before the break, the Cards never looked like a team in danger. Wes Durham summed it up late in the third quarter: “Louisville is in full control.”
The numbers backed that up. The Cardinals piled up 258 rushing yards and got standout moments all over the field, including Tre Richardson’s 52-yard touchdown on a wide receiver sweep, Jackson Voth’s 68-yard punt return and two sacks from Clev Lubin. Braxton Jennings later added a touchdown of his own.
The play that stood out most wasn’t even one of the scoring bursts. Early in the second quarter, with Louisville already ahead 24-3 and facing first-and-10 at the Georgia Tech 48, Isaac Brown took a shotgun handoff, bounced outside for eight yards and turned a routine run into something much better.
He pressed the edge, hesitated just enough to make a defender miss, then cut back inside and kept the play alive for extra yardage. It was the kind of run that makes a defense look helpless.
By the end, the result was never in question. Louisville held serve, and the larger ACC picture is still very much in play. The next challenge comes at North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
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One of the bigger pregame questions centered on Isaac Brown, who was a gametime decision and added another layer of uncertainty to an offense already facing a real test away from home. Louisville has had success in this series and is looking to extend that streak, but the real interest here is how the Cardinals handle the Yellow Jackets' challenge once the game starts to tighten. [Read more 🡒]