By Ed Peak

Your friendly correspondent pontificated on this website in August that the upcoming football season would be better than anyone thought, predicting up to five wins and an outside chance at a bowl game.

Not telling you I told you so. But low and behold, the University of Louisville is 6-4 and bowl eligible with two games to play. But no one could have foreseen this. Coach Scott Satterfield has clearly earned ACC Coach of the Year honors. Unfortuantely, that won’t happen because of undefeated Clemson and Dabo Swinney.

A friend told me early in the season that he didn’t care for Satterfield’s offense. “He runs high school plays, junior college plays,”  Well buddy, this Louisville team racked 62 points against Wake Forest, and is averaging 32.2 points and 437.2 total yards per game.

The offense led by sophomore Micale Cunningham has completed 63.2 percent of his passes and 14 touchdowns. That ranks fifth in the ACC. UofL leads the nation in yards per completion 17.06 with eight plays of 40 or more yards.

Sophomore Tutu Atwell, with his blazing speed, has 920 receiving yards,  Javian Hawkins, a redshirt freshman, has ground out 1,045 yards, needing only three more to break Victor Anderson’s record in 2008. The defense is still a work in progress, giving up an average of 432.4 yards a game and almost 28 points.

That is  still an improvement over last season’s run and hide defense. Satterfield has said every ACC win could go down to the wire and has. An onside kick flub here or there and we wouldn’t be talking this way.”We as coaches and players have to scrap and clew for everything we get,” he confided.

So enjoyable watching all those raucous locker room celebrations. Especially after all the doom and gloom last season.  There’s still more to come. Enjoy. It should be entertaining.

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By Ed Peak

Ed Peak has covered UofL sports since 1973, as a student reporter, as a correspondent for the Courier-Journal, a freelancer for the Associated Press and United Press International, as well as ScoreCard, Fox Sports and CBS radio.