Football, Volleyball and More -- Sunday Cardinal Couple

Football

Let's start on an upbeat note, shall we?  At least mostly upbeat.  Football, in their season opener did knock off Purdue up at Lucas Oil Stadium by a score of 35-28.  This victory is diminished slightly by some bad ball security, and a shocking number of penalties.  As I saw someone say on Twitter this morning, an ugly win is better than a pretty loss, so we'll take it, learn from it, and move on.

Credit to Purdue for keeping it close and forcing the Cards to score the last 10 points of the night to win this one. And, once again, Lamar Jackson shows why he is the reigning Heisman trophy winner with a huge performance in Indy.

485 Total Yards for LJ8...which was over 100 more than the entire Purdue team managed. 

Volleyball

Kent State

Volleyball had two matches yesterday in The Cardinal Classic.  The first, in the early afternoon was
against Kent State.  KSU was clearly the outclassed team all weekend, but they were a fun team to watch, mostly because they scrambled a lot, and did a pretty good job of it.  With the result is that they kept all of the games surprisingly close in score, though I don't think they won a set all weekend.  The Cards won, in straight sets, 25-14, 25-17, 25-19.

A slight change to the starting lineup in this one, with Piper Roe starting in place of Maggie DeJong.  Unofficial word that I heard is that she pulled an abdominal muscle in warmups for the Kent State match, very minor, and she saw action again in the evening matchup.  Piper made the best of her opportunity, putting down 7 kills on 9 attempts, for an absolutely eye-popping .778.  Melanie McHenry and Tess Clark again formed the third leg of the offensive stool, both hitting .318.  Melanie got 8 kills on 22 attempts, and Tess got 10 on 22 attempts, just with two more hitting errors than McHenry (3 vs 1).  Megan Sloan made an appearance in this match, and also took advantage of her opportunity with 5 kills on 10 attempts in only 2 sets played.

Defense was mostly by committee, though Piper did contribute well in blocking as well, with a solo and four shares, nearly half of the team's total of 7.  Digs were pretty evenly distributed, with Wilma Rivera getting the most at 13 as opponents continue to target her to try to take her out of her setting duties.  The two dynamic duos in the back row, Molly Sauer, and Gabbie Wiley, along with Molly and freshman Alexis Hamilton accounted for a total of 18, (7 for Molly, 9 for Gabbie, and 6 for Alexis).  The 6'2" McHenry continues to show her versatility in all-rotation play by also picking up 6.

Overall a good outing, and then evening came.

Illinois

Illinois came in to form the marquee matchup of The Cardinal Classic.  An (honestly, surprising to me) unranked Illinois team came in and showed that, despite having a new coach (probably a big part of why they were unranked to start the season) they haven't dropped a beat.  The Cards were looking for revenge for the elimination from the NCAA tournament in 2015, also in Cardinal Arena, but it wasn't to be.  Illinois came away with the win, 25-18, 25-15, 25-20.

Full credit to Illinois, who is still a very fine team, that never gave up on a ball, and with size and power that the Cardinals just couldn't match.  While Louisville was getting a lot of deflections and tips at the net, they just didn't have the size and height to get solid blocks, with only three total for the match.

UofL struggled to remain in system, and just didn't play very sharp.  I have no doubt that the team will be looking at plenty of film from this one, to find their mistakes and ways to improve.  One of Coach Busboom Kelly's saying comes into play, here, "Win, or learn."  There will be lot's to learn from in this one.

The Wide Netters head back out on the road next, with a trip out west to Vegas, for the UNLV Challenge.  There, they'll meet up with UC Irvine, Weber State, and of course host UNLV.  From what I've seen of this Cards team, and despite knowing precious little about these opponents, I do expect UofL to come out of this weekend with three more in the win column.

Don't give up on this team.  They may be only 2-3 in their record at this point, but those three losses are to ranked teams and a team that should be ranked, and probably will be in tomorrow's poll.  Also, in that win column is a win over a ranked team.  I would stand up UofL's strength of schedule to this point against any team in the country.  There are good things ahead, here.

Field Hockey

Sowry's squad looks to get back to the winning ways today at noon, where they also take on the Kent State Golden Flashes.  Let's hope the Field Hockey squad has as much success against them as the Volleyball team did, and help set a pattern for the Football team to follow three weeks from now when they tangle with Kent State here in Louisville.

Field Hockey is on the road for this one, in Columbus OH.  They'll be coming out angry after taking the loss to Ohio State, Friday.  No video or audio of this one, that we're aware of.

The Cardinal Couple Radio Hour

The latest episode of The Cardinal Couple Radio Hour is up on the soundcloud, and my snarkerator was a finely tuned machine yesterday.  We had audio from Dani Busboom Kelly after the volleyball win over WKU Friday, and had a wonderful live chat by phone with Cortnee Walton in our Catching Up series.  One takeaway from that, be sure to listen for her on the call a number of ACC Network Extra events this year.  Otherwise, we did touch, at least briefly, on all of the various sports competing...things get busy in the fall.  Check it out, won't you?

https://soundcloud.com/chradio/cardinal-couple-20170902

-- JMcA