Projecting Louisville's Second Half of 2023 Using SP+ and FPI

The Cardinals enter their bye week with a 6-1 mark under first year head coach Jeff Brohm.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The bye week is finally here for the Louisville football program.

Up to this point, the Cardinals have had a successful 2022 season, going 6-1 overall and 3-1 in ACC play. That being said, they are heading into the break having just suffered their first loss of the season, coming off of a 38-21 defeat at Pitt.

Louisville will officially kickoff their second half of their 2023 campaign when they host Duke on Saturday, Oct. 28 at L&N Stadium. It won't be an easy endeavor the rest of the way, as three of their toughest games on the schedule - vs. Duke, at Miami and vs. Kentucky - will all be waiting for them down the stretch.

The next five games will be crucial in determining if Louisville is going to have a good first season under Jeff Brohm, or a great one, and maybe even a truly special season. So how well will the Cardinals perform down the stretch? Well, we already have some idea thanks to ESPN's predictive college football metrics, SP+ and FPI.

SP+, according to its creator Bill Connelly, is a "tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency." It takes into account three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history. As for FPI, it is a "predictive rating system designed to measure team strength and project performance going forward," vaguely similar to that of SP+.

First, we'll start with SP+. Louisville's SP+ rating currently sits at 10.7 through the first seven weeks of the 2023 season, which is good for 29th in FBS.

Using SP+, we can plug in the rating from each team on Louisville's schedule and take a deep dive into how the 2023 season might transpire. We can figure out the win percentage in each game (accounting for home vs. away), the expected wins mark at the end of the season, as well as the statistical likelihood of every outcome during and concluding the season.

Louisville's Remaining 2023 SP+ Chart

As you can see, SP+ is pretty high on Louisville the rest of the way. It has them as favorites in three of their final five games of the season, two of them decisively. In the other two games, only one game are they a noticeable underdog.

Louisville has an expected wins mark of 9.01, and they have a 38.05 percent chance to finish the season with exactly nine wins, the highest out of any other win mark. For all intents and purposes, SP+ is projecting the Cardinals to go 3-2 down the stretch and finish the regular season at 9-3.

But what about FPI? As it turns out, it's a little higher on the Cardinals. With an FPI rating of 9.6, Louisville comes in at No. 25 in all of FBS through the first seven weeks of the season.

FPI is what ESPN uses to power their matchup predictor, which as you can probably guess, projects the win probabilities of every college football game involving teams at the FBS level.

Louisville's Remaining 2023 Schedule with FPI Ratings and Projected Results

Date	Team	FPI Rating	UofL Win Prob.
Oct. 28	vs. Duke	12.3 (22nd)	52.9%
Nov. 4	vs. Virginia Tech	0.4 (63rd)	78.2%
Nov. 9	vs. Virginia	-6.9 (96th)	90.4%
Nov. 18	at Miami	13.1 (21st)	34.0%
Nov. 25	vs. Kentucky	4.7 (43rd)	68.5%

FPI paints a more positive outlook for Louisville, projecting them as clear favorites against Virginia, Virginia Tech and Kentucky. It projects the Cardinals being a clear underdog at Miami, with the game against Duke essentially being projected as a pick 'em.

In fact, according to the metric, Louisville still has a 3.4 percent chance to win the ACC. As far as the projected win-loss total goes, FPI puts the Cardinals at 9.3-2.9 without rounding.

In layman's terms, both metrics are projecting Louisville to have a good end to the 2023 regular season, with the potential to have a strong end and officially claim a double digit win campaign. Regardless, the Cardinals will have their hands full when play resumes.

(Photo of L&N Stadium via University of Louisville Athletics)

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