Louisville had its worst season in program history in 2022-23. The debut campaign of first-year head coach Kenny Payne was, any way you look at it, an abject disaster. The season ended with four wins, a whopping 28 losses and a whole lot of uninspired effort on both ends. None of the four wins came outside the KFC Yum! Center, and only one of them — a February tilt vs. Clemson — came against a team that finished in the top half of its respective league standings.
The second year of the Payne era, though, was looking up — (emphasis on the was) — until this week when the Cardinals’ second highest-rated signee of their top-10 class, Trentyn Flowers, sent out a bombshell announcement that he is leaving the school just a week before the fall semester is set to start. Flowers announced the decision while stating his intentions of playing in the Australian NBL, a league that has a program tailored for blue-chip prospects who have dreams of ultimately landing in the NBA. The NBL has a Next Stars program where the likes of LaMelo Ball, RJ Hampton and Terence Ferguson sharpened their skills before making the leap to the league.
Bad time to lose a top player
While Flowers’ decision could prove best for his long-term development given the league’s success in acting as a developmental steppingstone for some big names, the truth is that it exacerbates concerns about how Louisville can bounce back from rock bottom of the ACC and a college hoops laughingstock. Even with an expected top-10 class with Flowers previously in tow, a battle back to relevancy nationally — much less competing and holding its own in the ACC — always felt like a stretch for Louisville in 2023-24. Talent may still be upgraded from last season, sure, but No. 1. That’s a pretty low bar! and No. 2. Experience was not going to be on its side, even with some promising transfer imports. You can work numbers around and try to make up lost production in most instances if a top-30 player leaves, no problem, but in the middle of August with school starting within the week?
Good luck. Louisville will have to take the capital L.
CBS Sports Bracketology Expert Jerry Palm has his way-too-early bracket projections out already for 2024, and in a surprise to absolutely no one, Louisville isn’t in the mix, much less on the bubble, much less being on the bubble of being on the bubble. Even more bleak: BartTorvik.com’s early look at 2023-24 has only one ACC team — rebuilding Notre Dame — with a worse outlook than Louisville. His projections have Louisville ranked No. 146 among 361 Division I teams. That’s only missing the NCAA Tournament picture by … 78 spots. (Only 68 teams make the field, so even if there were two, separate 68-team NCAA Tournaments with two, entirely different fields, Louisville would be projected to miss both tournaments.)
Counting on freshmen
Freshmen rarely make the type of winning impact that most expect in college hoops — especially freshmen who reclassify, like Flowers did earlier this year — and let’s be fair: it’s far too soon to write the obit on Louisville’s 2023-24 season before it even begins. How big a role Flowers would’ve had is up for debate, for one, and even teams on paper with as bad as prospects as Louisville have flipped scripts and gone on to have winning seasons. It happens all the time, and college hoops’ constant player movement makes projecting teams a near-impossible task. Look no further than Kansas State, which was picked to finish last in the Big 12 last season before earning a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament months later and finishing as the conference’s last team standing with a run to the Elite Eight.
Still, it’s hard to feel like the losses of last season haven’t stopped piling up into the offseason and have now begun to bleed over into a new season. We’re just barely over a decade removed from Louisville cutting down the nets and winning the national championship* in Atlanta while consistently operating as a top team in its conference. The only real contending it has done since Payne took over the program has been with Notre Dame for which team is the worst in the ACC. With Flowers’ decision to leave the talent-challenged Cardinals in a tough spot at a tough time, it doesn’t seem likely that will change anytime soon.
