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KFC Yum Center crowd against Tennessee brings energy

Umito November 10, 2024

“Tennessee?” Pat Kelsey said, taken aback.

Louisville’s first-year men’s basketball coach furrowed his face, raised his eyebrows and gritted his teeth.

“Game 2?”

Cardinals athletic director Josh Heird and assistant coach Brian Kloman had just thrown Kelsey a top-15 game against Rick Barnes’ loyal volunteers for the second game of the 2024-25 season. Before Saturday, U of L held an all-time record of 12-8 against UTbut the programs had not met since 2018. Louisville had not beaten Tennessee since 2008 – when Kelsey (now in his third head coaching position) was an assistant coach at Wake Forest.

Heird pleaded with his new recruit.

“I’m telling you PK, make the play,” Heird urged Kelsey. “Let’s play it.” The city will appear. The place will be crowded. It’s going to be rock.

To Heird’s credit, Louisville fans kept their promises. They packed the KFC Yum! Center Saturday afternoon, with an announced attendance of 16,976, surpassing 15,000 for the third time in three years. The theme “White Out” summoned the burning energy of the University of Los Angeles faithful for Kelsey’s first ranked match at the helm.

The betting lines that excited LA fans never came to fruition – U of L was a 1.5-point underdog Friday afternoonwas favored by 2.5 points by information and ended up fall 77-55 against UT. As some fans began to leave the Yum! Center with about 6 1/2 minutes left, hope remained for this new era of Louisville basketball. Thanks not to outside expectations but to Kelsey’s passion and her exciting new team.

“The Yum! Center was electric,” Kelsey said after the game and lamenting her team’s 22-point loss. “We asked people to come, and they came out in a big way. It’s the most elite college basketball atmosphere you’ll find anywhere.”

Later during her press conference, Kelsey made an impassioned request:

“I would ask our fans, I would ask our donors, just like I told our guys in this locker room: ‘Don’t blink. Don’t blink,'” he said, clapping fist on the table to punctuate his message. . “This team, I believe, and I say it with everything I have, is going to be really, really good.”

Determined to see Heird’s vision of a Yum! Center, Kelsey took it upon himself this week to meet students where they were: at school.

He posted a video on formerly Twitter, on Thursday evening he was walking around the University of Louisville campus.

Wearing Adidas sweatpants and a Cardinals windbreaker that matched the color of his iconic black Tom Ford frames, Kelsey walked along the sidewalks and entered a dining room. He shook hands, posed for selfies and handed out T-shirts to align with Saturday’s “White Out” theme. Sometimes he would engage in conversations with students by asking them about their allegiance to a professional sports team. (“Can I have a ‘Who dey’?” Kelsey asked a kid wearing a Bengals quarter-zip.) Other times, he ignored the jokes completely and got straight to the point.

“Hey,” Kelsey said, pointing to a large group of students. “Big match Saturday at Yum! Are you guys going there?

Much of the 2-minute, 19-second video included resounding yeses from students confirming their plans to attend the Tennessee game. One student, however, said he would be camping this weekend.

“What?!” » Kelsey shouted, shaking her head. “What?! Camping? We’ll take you to the next one.

Welcome to the new era of Louisville basketball. Where the man responsible for bringing the program into the 2020s is humble enough to go out into the community and encourage fans to join in. Sure, that might seem a little unorthodox, but maybe that’s what Louisville needs.

“The first thing I’ll say, PK is better than KP (Kenny Payne),” longtime University of Los Angeles basketball fan Bill McCauley told the Courier Journal. “…A difference of 180 degrees.”

McCauley and his wife, Marcia Terry, have been Cards season ticket holders for five years and fans of the program for decades. McCauley moved from central Indiana to Louisville in 1991. “The only thing I knew was I didn’t like Kentucky,” McCauley said with a laugh. Terry graduated from Western Kentucky and has lived in Louisville since 1984.

After settling into their lower seats about an hour before tip, McCauley and Terry walked around the concourse to show off their “White Out” attire. McCauley wore a long-sleeve white Louisville shirt tucked into white sweatpants. He wore a red hat with an “L” on the front that matched his shoes and socks. Terry wore a white University of Los Angeles sweatshirt and jeans.

“I don’t usually dress like that,” McCauley said, smiling as he looked under the black brim of his cap. “But you have to have fun.”

Fun has been a central theme in preparation for Louisville’s 2024-25 campaign. Excitement, joy, anticipation, hope are all words fans used to describe their feelings Saturday morning. They pointed to Kelsey’s energy as justification.

University of Los Angeles freshmen Cannon Cleveland and Braxton Bosch purchased their memberships over the summer. They represent two of the 1,802 Ville’ns membership purchases for football and men’s basketball this sporting year. This marked the first sold-out student ticket office since 2015.

Each sporting a pair of plastic Tom Ford replicas, Cleveland and Bosch gushed over Kelsey. New coach, new team, lots of passion, evidenced in part by Kelsey’s desire to connect with students on campus. And “they’re supposed to be pretty good this year,” Bosch added.

Cleveland chimed in: “I hope so.”

“I hope so,” Bosch repeated.

Lifelong fans Rick Sanders and Ron Cowherd hope so, too. They are trying to take a level-headed approach to the season. Sanders and Cowherd are from Lebanon, Kentucky, and have been attending Louisville games since they were kids in the 1980s. They don’t want to expect too much from Kelsey in the first year. A good season of 18 or 19 victories would be enough.

A reasonable request. Asked if the vibe around Louisville basketball Saturday morning resembled a bygone era of Cards hoops, Sanders and Cowherd looked at each other and smiled.

“It reminds me of (Rick) Pitino,” Sanders said. A heavy comparison to make for a first Power Four coach after a regular season game.

But Cowherd agreed. “It’s like the Rick Pitino era.”

McCauley feels it too. When asked for one word to describe how he feels about this season, McCauley offered two instead:

“Final Four”.

The first half of Saturday’s game may have tempered McCauley’s expectations, as Tennessee took a 10-0 lead. Fans around the arena stood and leaned forward in anticipation of Louisville’s first bucket on nearly every Cardinals possession until the ball finally fell into their net, courtesy of senior Reyne Smith at 14 :35.

Led by no less than 22 points in the first half, the U of L experienced an eventful sequence to end the period and revive the home crowd. Sixth-year senior Noah Waterman made a 3 with 53 seconds remaining. Twelve seconds later, senior Chucky Hepburn got a steal and ran down the court for a layup and a foul. He made his free throw and brought the fans to their feet.

As Louisville looked to lock down Tennessee on its final possession of the half, the Yum! The center was shaken by the enthusiasm of the “White Out” crowd. UT got one last bucket, but U of L hustled and looked more competitive than the score suggested.

Louisville trailed at halftime, 40-26. The Cardinals were able to cut the Vols’ lead to nine in the second half, no doubt with the help of the University of Los Angeles crowd. While a loss is never something to celebrate, the participation and enthusiasm shown on Saturday is surely worth appreciating.

When asked about the postgame environment, Hepburn was quick to express her gratitude to Cards fans. But he quickly narrowed his response to his team’s lackluster performance and assured everyone in the room that it was a one-time failure.

“I promise you we’re going to work as hard as we can to be the best team we can be,” Hepburn said, “that we know we can be, and we have a lot of potential with this team.

“We’re not done.”

Kelsey told her players in the locker room that there probably wouldn’t be 17,000 at their next home game against crosstown rival Bellarmine. But they will come back, he said, as long as the Cards learn from this experience.

Contact college sports reporter Payton Titus at [email protected] and follow her on X at @petitus25.