UK’s schedule has been harder than Louisville’s, but will that matter in Governor’s Cup?

While Kentucky football has dominated the last four games of the Governor’s Cup rivalry, one needs only look back two seasons to find a game where the Wildcats entered as an underdog against Louisville.

Despite Kentucky entering the 2021 matchup with two more wins than Louisville, oddsmakers established the Cardinals as a two-point favorite in their home stadium. Kentucky players and coaches used that perceived slight as motivation on the way to a 52-21 blowout.

After the win, UK coach Mark Stoops made it clear that he felt the test that had come with playing eight games against SEC competition had better prepared his team for the rivalry game than Louisville’s ACC slate.

“Go through 12 games, there’s going to be some ups and downs,” Stoops said after the win. “You’re not going to play your best. You’ve got to hope to win and get one when you’re not at your peak when you’re not at your best. It’s a tough, grueling, physical schedule when you’re playing in the SEC. It’s a physical game.

“I think you could tell our style and theirs is very different.”

Two years later, Louisville is a heavy favorite for the 2023 rivalry edition.

The circumstances have changed — namely Louisville has rocketed into the top 10 in the first year under head coach Jeff Brohm — but the difference in strength of schedule has remained.

Louisville will be the fourth opponent Kentucky has faced this season currently ranked in the top 10, a statistic Stoops was quick to cite at his Monday news conference. Four of UK’s five losses have come against ranked teams.

Meanwhile, Louisville has played just one team currently ranked in the top 25, No. 17 Notre Dame, on the way to a 10-1 start to the Brohm era. There are reasons to wonder if Louisville would have had the same success if it had played Kentucky’s schedule.

If Kentucky has a chance to pull off the upset Saturday, it probably involves the rivals’ differing strength of schedule proving the gap between the two teams is not what it appears to be on paper.

“I don’t really want to make a comment on that without feeling like I’m being condescending or defensive of what I had to do,” Stoops said Monday when asked how the SEC schedule prepares Kentucky to face competition from other Power Five conferences. “... There were games on there like last Saturday (at South Carolina), it was inexcusable, so there is no defense and I’m not looking for one. … I can only comment on our schedule, not anybody else’s, and like I said, come live it for a minute.”

Of course, arguing Kentucky’s more difficult strength of schedule might lead to a Louisville win would require a number of assumptions there is little evidence for.

One, while Kentucky has played tougher competition, the Wildcats have yet to prove capable of beating any of those ranked teams. Louisville did at least beat the one ranked team on its schedule.

Two, after UK’s loss to South Carolina, which needs to beat Clemson on Saturday to even reach a bowl game, it is fair to wonder if the Wildcats are better this season than the unranked teams Louisville has beaten in ACC play.

“I think they’re well coached,” Brohm said of Kentucky on Monday. “They came ready to play (in the rivalry) and they’ve won these past so many years. I think for our program, we’ve got to understand that this is going to be a very talented football team that knows how to win football games and has competed against really good opponents all year long. They’re not going to back down from us one bit. They’re going to come in here wanting to win and put it to us and we’re going to have to respond.”

Kentucky has won 23 of its last 24 nonconference games. The only loss in that stretch was the Music City Bowl against Iowa last season when the Wildcats lost multiple players, including star quarterback Will Levis and star running back Chris Rodriguez, to opt-outs and were playing without a full-time offensive coordinator. Much of the recent nonconference success has come against Group of Five conference and FCS competition, but that stretch also includes four wins against Louisville and bowl wins against Penn State, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State and Iowa.

The last win against Louisville, a 26-13 victory last season, was not quite as dominant as the three blowouts that preceded it, but that Louisville team had won five of six entering the game while Kentucky was coming off back-to-back losses, including an embarrassing home defeat to Vanderbilt just two weeks earlier.

None of that history will matter if Kentucky’s current offense cannot find more success than it did in the 17-14 loss at South Carolina though. Perhaps there is a risk of Louisville looking ahead to the ACC championship game matchup with Florida State next week, but Brohm made it clear his staff views the rivalry as important and will communicate that message to players.

Kentucky can at least enter the matchup knowing it has faced teams of Louisville’s quality or better before though.

“It’s a pretty good group that we’ve played against,” Stoops said. “No excuse for last week’s loss whatsoever. I think that’s what makes that one very frustrating, but we know what we’re capable of.

“Whether we’re playing the No. 1 ranked team in the country, which we have, or anybody else, it’s truly always about us and how we play. Saturday wasn’t much different, we had our opportunities and in certain moments we fell short. There’s one way out of that stuff — go work. Go work and go grind and show the resolve that our teams generally have had. Again, we know we’re not perfect, we know we got things to work on but we’ve always had the ability and the toughness and the grit to fight back.”

Saturday

Kentucky at No. 10 Louisville

When: Noon Saturday

TV: ABC-36

Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1

Records: Kentucky 6-5 (3-5 SEC), Louisville 10-1 (7-1 ACC)

Series: Kentucky leads 19-15

Last meeting: Kentucky won 26-13 on Nov. 26, 2022, in Lexington

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