Cardinals fly into national spotlight.

Byline: Bob Rodman The Register-Guard

Seems these days the folks living in the Bluegrass State of Kentucky are seeing red. Cardinal red. They just can't get enough of Louisville football.

But it was not all that long ago you couldn't give away tickets to University of Louisville games, and the Cardinals tried.

"In the early 1980s, we had service stations giving away tickets to the games with a tank of gas," said Rocco Gasparro, the media contact for University of Louisville football, "and they couldn't.

"Today, we're announcing that Saturday's game against Oregon State is a sellout."

The Cardinal program has nudged its way onto the city's athletic marquee, right up there with the Derby, the university's famed basketball program and Louisville legends Muhammad Ali and Johnny Unitas.

With seven straight winning seasons, an equal number of consecutive bowl appearances, nearly 50 wins in the past five years, 25 national television dates in the past three years, an increasingly heated and successful rivalry with in-state neighbor Kentucky and even a coaching controversy or two, the Cardinals have flown straight into the world of big-time college football.

"We were going to play big-time football or I was not going to take the job," said Louisville director of athletics Tom Jurich, who is on a contract with the university that extends his stay through 2016.

Last season, Louisville just missed a perfect season but still hit the jackpot with an 11-1 record, a historic No. 6 national ranking, a Liberty Bowl win over Boise State and doing it all with the nation's most prolific offense that averaged 49.8 points and 539.0 yards a game.

"But when I first came to Louisville, it had lost 14 of its last 15 football games," Jurich said of his arrival in 1997. "In the Sagarin Ratings, it was ranked 138th, and that meant there were 28 NCAA Division I-AA teams ahead of Louisville."

Jurich changed coaches, from Ron Cooper to John L. Smith, the latter spending four winning and annual bowl-appearance years with the Cardinals before leaving after the 2002 season for Michigan State.

Jurich then hired Bobby Petrino to replace Smith. All Petrino has done is fashion a record of 21-5, make two more bowl appearances and supply that remarkable 2004 season.

"It was unbelievable when I came here," said Elvis Dumervil, a senior defensive end from Miami whose six quarterback sacks in Louisville's win over Kentucky to start the season were a school and Big East Conference record.

"When coach Smith left, coach Petrino came in and he took it to another level."

Good coaches, good players, good fans.

"People power," said Jurich, who also hired famed basketball coach Rick Pitino, "I like to have good people but we'll always be a blue-collar program."

It didn't hurt to have a white-collar athletic department budget, however, one that is approaching $39 million a year.

It also helped considerably to make the move from Conference USA to the Big East this year, yanking the Cardinals into the Bowl Championship Series family for the first time.

"With that non-BCS label on your back, it just kills you," Jurich said. "Moving into the Big East was one of the greatest things to happen for Louisville."

And it was of no small consequence that Cardinals decided they needed a showcase facility to show off their football program to the city with a population of 1 million.

With a pizza company at the head of a $63 million donation line and a decade's worth of drives, construction on Papa John's Cardinal Stadium - a 42,000-seat facility carpeted with FieldTurf - was completed in 1998.

There are plans to add luxury suites and 18,000 more seats in the near future.

"I've never seen so much excitement or anticipation as this city has for Louisville football," said Greg Brohm, a lifelong resident, the director of UL football operations, a receiver on the Cardinals' 1991 Fiesta Bowl team and brother of Cardinal assistant coach Jeff Brohm and current quarterback Brian Brohm. "The buzz is incredible."

The fascination with Louisville football is not new. The school's program has been on its way since the Howard Schnellenberger era began in the mid-1980s.

His decade with the Cardinals, beginning in 1985, was highlighted by a 10-1-1 season in 1990 that included a win over Alabama in the Fiesta Bowl. Schnellenberger's 10-year run at Louisville fueled the Cardinal football mania that flourishes today.

"We have a motto around here," Jurich said. "Dare to be great. Howard brought a great vision, a lot of passion, was idolized after winning a national championship at Miami (in 1983) and he dared to dream, dared to be great."

Schnellenberger, who said he was "about 70" years old, is currently coaching at Florida Atlantic, a Sun Belt Conference team based in Boca Raton, Fla.

"My idea was to do at Louisville what I had done at Miami, get a commitment of support from the people there, get an increased budget, start recruiting good players from Florida and Kentucky and elsewhere, and start playing the best teams," he said.

At Miami, which had three winning seasons in the prior dozen years including Schnellenberger's first in 1979, he applied his theory of the "ascending spiral.

"That's what's going on at Louisville now," he said. "As long as you stoke the engine, pump out wins, produce bowl games, produce media coverage, exposure and excitement, you get the good recruiting classes, good seasons, more bowls and the spiral goes on."

Schnellenberger scheduled the Cardinals for gantlet-like dates with such powers as Texas, Ohio State, Tennessee, Miami and Florida State.

It took seasons of 2-9, 3-8 and 3-7-1 before the Schnellenberger experiment succeeded. Louisville was 8-3 in 1988, and two years later beat Alabama in the 1991 Fiesta Bowl to finish 10-1-1 - a milestone season until Smith's 2001 team fashioned an 11-2 record and Petrino's bunch finished 11-1 last year.

For a 15-year stretch, including three years into Schnellenberger's tenure, Louisville had just two winnings seasons.

"Like anyplace that has been perennially downtrodden, a program must change its outlook to have success," said Schnellenberger, who is attempting to manage the same maneuver at Florida Atlantic.

Part of that outlook shift was to foresee, finance and then construct a new stadium.

"We were playing on a baseball field," Schnellenberger said. "If you don't build it, they won't come, and that's for sure. But more important was how we built it.

"There were 3,500 season ticket-holders who put $17 million in the bank as seed money for the stadium, and some of those people took out second mortgages to do it. The state swapped some land for 100 acres to build the facility and the parking."

So, the Louisville football program lived, and is living very well these days.

There are the glitches from time to time, including the stir over Petrino being wooed for the vacant LSU coaching job just days prior to the Cardinals' Liberty Bowl game against Boise State last December.

It also had happened to Louisville two years earlier with Smith and the prelude to his Michigan State move.

"I'm not afraid when they come after my people," Jurich said, "as long as they do it in an appropriate way."

So, the Cardinals fly on.

"We're a national name now," Jurich said. "Anybody who has played us will not refer to Louisville as a mid-major. We're spending $11 million a year on football."

And it shows.

THE NEW CARDINALS RULE

Louisville football has marched onto the national stage and plans on staying there after seven straight bowl appearances.

Year Record Bowl

2004 11-1 Liberty, beat Boise St. 44-40

2003 9-4 GMAC, lost to Miami (Ohio) 49-28

2002 7-6 GMAC, lost to Marshall 38-15

2001 11-2 Liberty, beat BYU 28-10

2000 9-3 Liberty, lost to Colorado St. 22-17

1999 7-5 Humanitarian, lost to Boise St. 34-31

1998 7-5 Motor City, lost to Marshall 48-9

CAPTION(S):

Papa John's Cardinal Stadium is a 42,000-seat facility completed in 1998 that features a sea of red-clad fans on gameday.