One Reason to Believe in Kentucky over Louisville: Bobby Petrino

Bobby Petrino has built up a perception based on two pillars: he is a skeezeball jerk with zero ounces of loyalty, but he’s one of the best offensive minds in college football.  Both may be true (especially the former), but just because he knows how to run an offense does not mean he knows how to run an entire football team.

Louisville has scary numbers but they have beaten zero good teams.  That’s not a Rick Pitino hyperbole.  If Purdue beats Indiana today, it will be just the second team UofL has defeated in 2017 with a .500 record.  Virginia finished the season 6-6 with a loss to Virginia Tech.

To compare that to Kentucky’s schedule, the Cats beat eight-win South Carolina, seven-win Missouri and seven-win Southern Miss.

During Bobby 2.0, Petrino has only beat six teams with winning records.  Five of those six teams had five losses.

Petrino beats the crap out of teams he should beat, but he can’t beat good football teams.  Kentucky is not ranked.  If they were, you could go ahead and write in a win.  During his second stint at UofL, he’s 1-9 in vs. ranked opponents.

One more thing to consider.  Bobby loves to hate the “slapdicks” at Kentucky, but his teams are never prepared to play right away.  In all three games, Kentucky has landed the first punch.  Louisville needed a dominant Devante Parker to overcome an early deficit at Papa John’s, they needed a Lamar Jackson coming-out party to erase a 21-point deficit, but the Heisman couldn’t do enough last year.

Lamar Jackson is terrifying.  Bobby Petrino is not and that’s why Kentucky has a chance to keep the Governor’s Cup in Lexington and potentially end his second stint at Louisville with a loss.

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