I'm boooooored

Really bored. LeBron to the Heat, Spain vs. Holland/Dutch/Netherlands, whatever. The Cinci Reds, frisky though they are, none of these stories stir my prodigious loins.

And in the words of Col. Nathan Jessup, "This fucking heat is driving me absolutely crazy!"

I want pads hitting pads. I want a crisp breeze. I want the Rudy music.

I need football. College football. Cardinal football.

I've followed Louisville football recruiting pretty closely the last few years, but even so, seeing some of these names in print on THE OFFICIAL UofL ROSTER hits things home a tad more.

Michaelee Harris. Corvin Lamb. Dominique Brown. Senorise Perry. These names shall be known and widely known soon.

Summer is vastly overrated.

Hold your horses

As excited as I am for new assistant coach Tim Fuller, I'm a little skeptical of the "immediate impact" article found in today's CJ. It just seems to fit a little too easily into the "arms race" narrative between Pitino-Calipari that so many are eager to promote.

I have no doubt that Fuller does have good relationships with Quincy Miller, Deuce Bello, etc., but we shouldn't misconstrue a few leading questions from reporters and some off the cuff comments made by some 17 year olds. Keep up the good work Coach Fuller, and if we do land one of the two mentioned above, I'll be "feelin you" big time.

Would he stay?

Cards fans: hope everyone back home had a safe and happy Fourth of July. My isolation, meditation and beer starvation here in India has granted me the clairvoyance to begin considering the most urgent of questions confronting the Louisville football program, one so obvious that even the man himself felt compelled to address it albeit indirectly: Should he prove successful, can Louisville hold on to Charlie Strong?

Sure, he hasn't won a single game as a college head coach yet. Sure, the graveyard of head coaches overflows with the corpses of many a promising head coach hyped as the one who would turn it around. And yes, his overall record as the Cardinals' head coach is 0-0, his overall head coaching record 0-1 (Florida's 2004 Peach Bowl loss to Miami). That just doesn't matter right now. It's the offseason and inflated expectations untampered by reality are free to reign. More to the point, genuine optimism about the football program is filling the air for the first time since the Petrino era.

The single and total reason for this, earned or not, is Strong. Cards fans adore him, are impressed by the mark he has made so swiftly on and off the field, are delighted by the sudden influx of quality recruits into the program. We are grateful that he has allowed us all to dream again of conference championships, BCS births, national prominence, and top-flight quality football.

Unfortunately, given our recent history with our head coaches before Kragthorpe, Louisville fans are conditioned to anticipate as a consequence of success the head coach's departure to supposedly brighter and better and greener pastures. It's how we lost John L. and how we lost Bobby Petrino, both of whom took flight from Louisville in a manner somewhere between "unceremonious" and "jumping out of the airplane with the last parachute and all women and children still on board."

For more than a decade Tom Jurich has sought to upgrade the program to the tier of its national competitors, therein nullifying the reasons a head coach wouldn't want to spend his career here. We now have the most excellent facilities in the country, a newly expanded stadium, a BCS conference bowl bid. The landscape now is such that if Louisville (or any other team) can dominate the Big East, it can legitimately compete for the national championship. In short, Louisville is a premier head coaching job now; Cards fans should start thinking that way. But we have been burned before, and so the question lingers: IF Charlie Strong proves successful, could we keep him?