Using SP+ to Project Louisville's 2026 Season

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - We still have several more months until the 2026 college football season gets underway, but Louisville is already starting to generate a good amount of hype for year four under head coach Jeff Brohm.

For starters, UofL is bringing back multiple impact playmakers, such running back Isaac Brown, edge rusher Clev Lubin, linebackers Stanquan Clark and Antonio Watts, and others. Additionally, Louisville also did a fantastic job in the portal, coming in at No. 5 in On3's transfer portal team rankings. This included welcoming Ohio State quarterback Lincoln Kienholz, Vanderbilt wide receiver Tre Richardson, UNC edge rusher Tyler Thompson, and multiple others.

Just how well will Louisville perform this fall? It is a little early to tell, but we already have some idea thanks to the predictive college football metric SP+.

SP+, according to its creator Bill Connelly of ESPN, is a "tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency". He has made several tweaks to it over the years since creating it in 2008 while at Football Outsiders, but the current iteration takes into account three primary factors: returning production, recent recruiting and recent history.

On Friday, Connelly released his first 2026 offseason SP+ rankings - and it's a little lower on Louisville than expected. Coming in with a rating of 11.0, Louisville is ranked 27th out of the now 138 teams in the FBS. They're also third in the ACC, behind Miami (8th at 21.0) and Clemson (23rd at 12.8).

While Brohm has a national reputation of being one of the better offensive minds in college football, the metric isn't super high on that side of the ball for the Cardinals, giving it a rating of 30.6, or 36th in FBS. Even coming off of a 2025 season where UofL was carried by their defense, SP+ doesn't think it's a top-25 unit in the sport, giving it a rating of 19.7 - or 26th 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 2025 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.

Opponent	Proj. SP+	Off. SP+	Def. SP+
Ole Miss	15.9 (16th)	35.0 (11th)	19.7 (25th)
Villanova	-20 (N/A)	N/A	N/A
SMU	10.9 (28th)	31.9 (25th)	20.7 (32nd)
Wake Forest	3.6 (58th)	24.2 (83rd)	20.7 (31st)
NC State	4.9 (48th)	30.7 (35th)	25.3 (64th)
Florida State	8.8 (35th)	29.7 (45th)	20.6 (30th)
Syracuse	-0.7 (69th)	23.9 (85th)	25.0 (59th)
Stanford	-1.9 (75th)	22.7 (97th)	24.0 (55th)
Georgia Tech	6.0 (43rd)	28.8 (53rd)	23.4 (51st)
North Carolina	3.8 (54th)	24.5 (80th)	21.1 (35th)
Pitt	6.5 (41st)	30.2 (40th)	23.8 (53rd)
Kentucky	3.8 (53rd)	25.0 (75th)	21.2 (36th)

Louisville's 2026 SP+ Chart | Matthew McGavic - Louisville Cardinals On SI

While SP+ doesn't regard Louisville as a top-25 team right now, you would think the metric would still paint an optimistic picture considering the perception that the Cardinals' schedule isn't as difficult as the last few years. That isn't necessarily the case.

On one hand, Louisville face just one team that boasts a higher SP+ rating than them: Ole Miss. In fact, in every one of the other 11 games, they have an over 50.0 percent chance of winning.

On the other, of those 11 games, the Cards are only decisive favorites in five of them: at home against Villanova, Wake Forest, Stanford and Pitt; and at Syracuse. In the other six - at home vs. SMU and Florida State; and at NC State, Georgia Tech, North Carolina and Kentucky - Louisville is the favorite, but just slightly. The games against the Mustangs and Yellow Jackets, to use a betting term, are even bordering on "pick 'em" status.

If you were to go purely based on game-to-game win percentages, Louisville's ceiling could be as high as 11 wins. However, pool all the collective win percentages together, and Louisville has an expected wins mark of 7.79. Add in the fact that they have a 24.73 percent chance to finish the season with eight wins, the highest out of any other win mark, SP+ is projecting the Cardinals to go 8-4 in 2026 - at least right now.

There's still an entire offseason in front of Louisville, which includes the latter half of spring ball, summer workouts and the entirety of fall camp. But if SP+ is to be believed, year four under Brohm could be disappointing when compared to how current expectations are being laid out.

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