Scott Satterfield shephered his alma mater, Appalachian State, from FCS to FBS, and built a consistent winner, going 51-24 in six seasons, including three double-digit-win years in the past four.
Now at Louisville, Satterfield may face a tougher job trying to move up from the basement of the ACC back to elite status in the Power 5.
“It’s very similar, I think. When I took over at App, we were going from the Southern Conference to the Sunbelt Conference, which is a step up. There’s a lot of things we had to do. We went from 63 scholarships to 85 scholarships. You had to build that team out to be competitive. We’re kind of doing that here,” said Satterfield, who is replacing Bobby Petrino, fired last November as Louisville was on its way to a 2-10 finish in 2018.
It’s hard to figure that just two years prior, in 2016, the Cardinals had started 9-1, were ranked #3 nationally in mid-November, and ended up having that year’s Heisman winner, quarterback Lamar Jackson.
The wheels came off the wagon quickly, and it’s hard to think that Satterfield will be able to get things turned around right away, anyway.
There isn’t a Jackson or Teddy Bridgewater in the locker room. There are two quarterbacks, Puma Pass and Malik Cunningham, who made starts in 2018, but neither could grab a hold of the starting job, and enter camp in a three-way competition with early enrollee Evan Conley.
The Cards return seven starters from last season’s defense, but that may necessarily be a good thing, considering that Louisville had one of the nation’s worst defenses in 2018, allowing 44.1 points and 483.6 yards per game, bottom-10 in all of college football in both categories.
Satterfield told reporters at last week’s ACC Kickoff that he had made it a point not to watch game tape of any of Louisville’s 2018 games, instead directing his video staff to cut up highlights from individual players so that he could get a sense of what they had to offer.
He also talked quite a bit about rebuilding the culture around the program, emphasizing trust and communication between players, coaches and the training staff.
“Our strength staff is around these guys all the time. They’re very consistent in their approach of how we do things. It’s the same way with the coaching staff. I think the way we’ll end up doing it is through our players, though. They’ve got to take ownership of the team,” Satterfield said.
It’s not going to be about wins and losses in 2019, but rather “attitude and effort, on a daily basis.”
“If you’re doing that, we’re doing those kind of things, we will end up winning games, we will end up having a very successful program. But it starts on a daily basis of how you carry yourself, what kind of attitude and effort do you have,” Satterfield said.
Story by Chris Graham
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