Projecting Louisville's 2023 Season Using SP+

Kickoff might be seven months away, but we have some idea of how the 2023 college football season will pan out for the Cardinals thanks to the SP+ metric.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The 2023 season will mark the start of a new era for the Louisville football program. Head coach Scott Satterfield is out after leaving for Cincinnati, and Purdue head coach Jeff Brohm is in, leaving the Boilermakers to coach his alma mater.

The 2022 campaign for the Cardinals was full of ups and downs, but they still finished on a high note and with a winning record. Louisville went 8-5 overall, including a 4-4 mark in Atlantic Coast Conference play and a 24-7 win over the Cincinnati in the Fenway Bowl.

Even with the coaching change and natural attrition through graduation and the NFL Draft, Louisville is in line to have a fairly talented roster in 2023. This is in part to Brohm's efforts both in the transfer portal and salvaging the Cardinals' recruiting class, and adding that to an already talented pool of returners.

That all being said, how well will Louisville perform in year one of the Jeff Brohm era? It is a little early to tell, considering spring practice hasn't even started yet and there is another transfer window on the horizon, but we already have some idea thanks to the predictive college football metric SP+.

SP+, according to its creator Bill Connelly of ESPN, is a "tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency". He has made several tweaks to it over the years since creating it in 2008 while at Football Outsiders, but the current iteration takes into account three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.

On Tuesday, Connelly released his early 2023 preseason SP+ projections. With a rating of 10.3, Louisville is ranked No. 36 out of 131 FBS teams.

Unsurprisingly given their success on that side of the ball last season, the metric is very high on the defensive side of the ball for the Cardinals, giving it a rating of 29.6, or 19th in FBS. Conversely, SP+ is not as big of a fan of the offensive side of things even with the influx of transfer talent, giving it a rating of 29.6, or 52nd in FBS.

Using SP+, we can plug in the rating from each team on Louisville's schedule and take a deep dive into how the 2022 season might transpire. We can figure out the win percentage in each game (accounting for home vs. away), the expected wins mark at the end of the season, as well as the statistical likelihood of every outcome during and concluding the season.

Opponent	Proj. SP+	Offensive SP+	Defensive SP+
Georgia Tech	-2.4 (70th)	22.0 (86th)	24.4 (51st)
Murray State	-20 (N/A)	N/A	N/A
Indiana	0.6 (64th)	28.6 (56th)	28.1 (70th)
Boston College	-3.2 (72nd)	21.7 (87th)	24.9 (53rd)
NC State	6.1 (46th)	26.3 (67th)	20.2 (22nd)
Notre Dame	18.9 (15th)	36.6 (25th)	17.7 (15th)
Pitt	9.4 (40th)	33.2 (37th)	23.8 (45th)
Duke	3.2 (56th)	29.9 (50th)	26.7 (64th)
Virginia Tech	-2.1 (69th)	21.5 (89th)	23.6 (44th)
Virginia	-4.8 (76th)	15.4 (120th)	20.2 (21st)
Miami	8.9 (42nd)	29.0 (55th)	20.1 (20th)
Kentucky	14.5 (24th)	28.5 (59th)	14.0 (6)

Louisville's 2023 SP+ Chart

SP+ is already pretty high on Louisville. Add the relatively easy schedule on top of it, and the metric becomes even more in their favor.

In fact, the Cardinals will play just two teams that boast a higher SP+ rating - Notre Dame and Kentucky - and have a win probably of over 50.0 percent in eight games of their 12 games. Louisville is a slight underdog at Pitt, vs. Miami and vs. Kentucky, and are decisive 'dogs vs. Notre Dame.

Louisville will have an expected wins mark of 7.96, and they have a 26.10 percent chance to finish the season with eight wins, the highest out of any other win mark. For all intents and purposes, as of right now, SP+ is projecting the Cardinals to go 8-4 in 2022.

A lot can happen between now and Sept. 1 when Louisville travels up down to Atlanta to kick off the season. But for the time being, it seems that Louisville is potentially shaping up to have a successful inaugural campaign under Brohm.

(Photo of Cardinal Stadium: Matt McGavic - Louisville Report)

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