Soon after Howard Schnellen-berger returned to his native Louisville to take over the university's football program in 1985, he made one of his trademark declarations.
"We're on a collision course with the national championship," the swashbuckling Schnellenberger said. "The only variable is time."
Schnellenberger became coach of a program coming off a 2-9 season with little tradition and an administration that was considering dropping football. But 20 years later, Schnellenberger's prediction is no longer laughable.
Louisville enters its first season in the reconfigured Big East as the prohibitive favorite for the conference's Bowl Championship Series berth. After an 11-1 season in 2004, with its only loss coming at Miami, Louisville's ability to contend for a national title is unquestioned.
"It looks like it's come to pass," Schnellenberger said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "Louisville reminds me a lot of the University of Miami."
Schnellenberger, now the coach at Florida Atlantic, led Miami's rise from obscurity to its first national title in 1983. Now Louisville is expected to take on Miami's former role as the Big East's flagship football program.
With Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College leaving in the past two years for the Atlantic Coast Conference, Louisville headlines the Big East's football newcomers, which include its fellow Conference USA defectors South Florida and Cincinnati.
Louisville will be expected to carry the new conference as Syracuse and Pittsburgh adjust to new coaches, South Florida and Connecticut mature as programs, and West Virginia replaces its top skill players from last season. And as happy as the Big East is to have Louisville, the Cardinals are delighted to be there.
"I think the greatest thing for our program is that we can look at our players in the eyes and look at the recruits we're talking to and tell them that if we win the Big East Conference, we're in a BCS bowl game," coach Bobby Petrino said at the Big East's media day Tuesday.
The beginning of Louisville's football revival traces back to Schnellenberger, who started a grass-roots project to build the current 42,000-seat stadium and gave the program a defining victory -- a 34-7 thrashing of Alabama in the 1991 Fiesta Bowl.
But after Schnellenberger left for Oklahoma following the 1994 season, the program went into a downward spiral under Ron Cooper, bottoming out with a 1-10 season in 1997.
Soon after, the athletic director Tom Jurich hired John L. Smith away from Utah State, and the program has not slowed since. Smith cobbled together a 7-5 record the next season, with Petrino as offensive coordinator, and the spread offense led the nation by averaging 559.9 yards a game.
It did not matter that Louisville could not stop anyone. The turnaround and the quirky offense gave the program some much-needed buzz. The Cardinals adopted a "First one to 50 wins" mantra and became a fixture on ESPN's weeknight games.
"People thought we were crazy, but I think it's done everything for this program because we needed exposure," Jurich said. "We've played every night of the week except Monday."
The publicity, combined with an offense attractive to skill-position players, helped fuel recruiting. Soon enough, Smith had the program soaring. Louisville went to bowl games in all five of Smith's seasons from 1998 through 2002, highlighted by an 11-2 season in 2001 and an overtime victory over No. 4 Florida State in 2002.
Smith left for Michigan State after the 2002 season, and Jurich brought back Petrino, who after installing his offense at Louisville 1998 went on to work as offensive coordinator for the Jacksonville Jaguars and Auburn.
In the last eight years, the football budget has increased to US$12 million from US$4.5 million, and a stadium expansion of 18,000 seats and 30 suites is in the works. Season tickets are capped at 35,000.
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