Louisville Has An Open Home Date In 2014, The Bearcats Should Fill It

The news comes from the Charleston Daily Mail.

U of L has added a road game with Notre Dame in 2014, which gives the program five home games and seven away -- a ratio that college athletic directors dislike.

Louisville isn't going to send MU athletics boss Mike Hamrick a $500,000 check to wiggle out of the home-and-home contract that was announced in 2009. Marshall won at Louisville, 17-13, in 2011 to snap a 19-game skid against teams from Bowl Championship Series leagues.

The more likely scenario, however, is that Marshall's home game on the back-end of the deal will be moved to 2015 or 2016 so that Louisville can add another home game next season and rectify the schedule imbalance.

(emphasis added)

This, coupled with the long expected decision to move the Kentucky game to the penultimate week of the season ala South Carolina-Clemson, Georgia-Georgia Tech and Florida-Florida State means the Cards have an opening at the front of the season. I would gladly trade a home game with Stony Brook for a road date with Louisville, particularly when it isn't that hard to buy an FCS game when you need one. Granted that would mean a non conference schedule in 2014 of Miami (oh), Toledo, @ Ohio State and @ Louisville, in a season being played in that soul-less bowl down by the river.

On the one hand that is, obviously, suboptimal from a revenue standpoint going from 7 home games to 6 home games for 2014. On the other that gives the non conference slate exactly the kind of punch up in quality that the Bearcats have to have to compete with Boise State for the one at large bid into the money bowls starting in 2014.

Whit Babcock has been trying to find a bigger named team to come to PBS in 2014 but has met with a lot of the usual resistance. If he can't find someone to come into town to play the Bearcats, this might be the kind of move that he has to make. It continues a great rivalry that is slated to end this year, in the same place where it would have been if UC and Louisville were in the same conference. More than that it opens up two distinctly positive possibilities for the Bearcats schedule going forward. 1) Opening New Nippert with the Keg of Nails possibly becomes a thing. 2) The Bearcats taking over Kentucky's role as the Cardinal's season starter.

Mind you I am not expecting either to come to pass, but they look far more possible today than they did yesterday, and thats not nothing. #KeepTheKegAlive

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