Sunday Cardinal Couple - Recaps Ahoy

Volleyball Gets an Easy Win

The Volleyball squad finished off their competition in Las Vegas with a pretty easy win over a clearly overmatched UNLV squad.  We did get notification of a streaming option on this one at the last minute, which I retweeting from the CardCoupleRadio account.  While it's always nice to watch your team get a win, this one wasn't particularly gripping and exciting volleyball.  The Cards played well, though there's always room for improvement  The Running Rebels of UNLV...well...they're just not in the same level of play at this point.  The Cards take this one 25-16, 25-16, 25-18.

Offensive power came from Melanie McHenry who hit is bombing .517 with 16 kills in the match.  Amanda Green also contributed, though less efficiently with 12 kills for .286.  In the middle, Maggie DeJong and Jasmine Bennett kept it solid with .545, and .250 hitting for 7 and 5 kills respectively.  They gave the Rebs fits with blocking though, with Maggie picking up 2 solos and 4 shares, while Jasmine got one of each.

I'm going to start calling Molly Sauer, "The Rock", with apologies to Dwayne Johnson, because she
is so even keeled and basically always turns in solid performances.  14 digs for The Rock, Gabbie Wiley also got 9 and 8 for Wilma Rivera accounts for the bulk of the defense.

I don't have a great deal of commentary on this one.  Whether you're the overmatching or overmatched team, it's hard to draw too many conclusions.  UofL played well, but it wasn't much of a test.  The match time clocked in at less than an hour and 20 minutes, as even the 16, 16, and 18 for UNLV is a bit misleading about how mismatched these teams were.

It's always good to get a win, and encouraging for the team to come away with a sweep of the weekend after the gauntlet that they've been running through the beginning of the season.  The team got to celebrate out with family and friends (documented in social media) with excursions out to the Las Vegas strip.  Take the time to enjoy yourselves and celebrate, because you'll be getting back down to business when you get back to Louisville to prepare for the next match in Lexington on Friday against a very good, and 13th ranked, Kentucky team.

After watching this match last night with my parents at their house, we pulled up the Minnesota vs Texas volleyball match that they had recorded Friday night.  A sobering reminder that, despite UofL outclassing UNLV like they did, there is still quite a long way to go to be playing at the level of teams like Minnesota and Texas.  For the record, Minnesota, #1 in the country, took down #5 Texas in 4 sets.  The level of play during that match was amazing, however.  If you want to see high level volleyball in action, you can check it out via the WatchESPN app as it was on The Longhorn Network Friday night.

Football Get a Not-So-Easy Win

UNC didn't really have any success in stopping everything Lamar tried to do, unsurprisingly to anyone in Louisville, but still apparently surprisingly to most Football pundits who still aren't taking Lamar seriously as a potential repeat Heisman winner.  UofL struggled in the first half of the game, but were able to put some distance on the Tarheels in the second in the 47-35 win.  I credit some of this to just tiring the UNC defense out as time of possession early in the game heavily favored the Cards.

The offensive line is holding well, a welcome change from last year, but our defensive secondary is not impressing.  UNC was able to break loose a number of big plays.  Special teams?  Yeah, a UNC kickoff return for a TD tells the story there.  While the likes of Barstool sports acknowledged the good effort of Blanton Creque in trying to run down the returner, it's pretty rare to find a kicker that can outrun a returner, who was able to pull away to get the TD.

Men's Soccer

Ken Lolla's squad lost a tough one to a very good Wake Forest team by a score of 3-1.  I don't see much shame in this one, but Case and Jared have shown that they're so much better analysts of soccer that I'll leave the breakdown to them.  Hopefully we'll hear from Case about this one tomorrow.

Don't Fear The Turtle

Maryland has used the phrase "Fear the Turtle" for their sports teams in the past.  I prefer to channel Blue Oyster Cult and "Don't Fear the Turtle", with more cowbell!

Sowry's Field Hockey team continues their weekend in the craziest shaped state in the country (I mean, really geographers, wassup with that?), and take on Maryland on their home field at 11:30.

Since Maryland left the ACC, they haven't been as aggressively testing in their conference schedules, but they make up for it with non-conference opponents.  They've already faced fellow ACC squads Duke, and Boston College, taking loses in both.  Wins against Towson, and Saint Joseph are solid wins, but not top level.  Coming into this game, Maryland sits in the 11th spot in the ranking, two below Louisville's 9th position.  This has the makings of being a very good game, and if you want to shell out for the Big 10 Plus addon to the Big 10 ToGo platform, you can watch it on streaming.  I'll be following along with Lori's tweets at the ULFieldHockey twitter account...which will also show up in the twitter widget on the right hand side of the site.

Radio Ga Ga

I think Queen hit the nail on the head in describing The Cardinal Couple Radio Hour.  Four guys babbling incoherently for an hour on Saturday morning?  Well, Case and Jared are pretty on the ball, at least.

In all seriousness, we covered a lot of territory yesterday, including a weather update, with lots of sports in action.  Check it out at https://soundcloud.com/chradio/cardinal-couple-20170909.  We had fun, we hope you did, too.

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JMcA