This Friday night
at the Liberty Bowl, we’ll have a rarity: a
stop-what-you’re-doing-and-pay-attention University of Memphis football game.
It’s a matchup
that makes memories. Memphis Tigers vs. Louisville Cardinals. Put those words on
a stadium scoreboard or television screen and a legion of Mid-South sports fans
will stop what they’re doing long enough to make another palm-sweating deposit
into their collective memory bank. And the sport doesn’t matter. You get the
impression, after living in these parts a few years, that a televised
thumb-wrestling showdown between the Tigers and Cardinals would trump the latest
offering on ESPN 2.
The sad truth,
though, is that these two rivals haven’t met on the gridiron or basketball court
in more than three years, not since the epic 2005 Conference USA basketball
championship, when Darius Washington collapsed at the free-throw line having
missed a pair of foul shots that would have given his Tigers a berth in the NCAA
tournament. Not to be forgotten, though, is the last football game between
Memphis and Louisville. Played merely four months before that basketball tilt,
the Tiger-Cardinal game on November 4, 2004, remains the best Memphis football
game of the decade. Oh heck, let’s say it: the best Memphis football game of the
century.
Played on a
Thursday night in front of a national-television audience, Memphis and
Louisville combined for 105 points and — grab your seat — nine lead changes. The
teams were led on offense by players who would share C-USA’s Offensive Player of
the Year honors. Memphis tailback DeAngelo Williams carried the ball 26 times
for 200 yards and scored on a 31-yard jaunt that gave the home team a 10-point
lead early in the second quarter. Louisville quarterback Stefan LeFors passed
for 321 yards and three touchdowns with nary an interception. Each team had a
rusher and receiver surpass 100 yards. Memphis won the total-offense battle, 603
yards (you read that correctly) to 599, but Louisville, alas, had the ball at
game’s end, LeFors converting a two-point conversion with 37 seconds on the
clock to give the bad guys a 56-49 win.
A year later,
Louisville joined the Big East Conference, and there went a football rivalry
that had seen 38 games in 44 years. This Friday night at the Liberty Bowl, that
rivalry is reborn.
The Tigers will
take the field looking to extend a winning streak to four games for the first
time since 2003, when the fourth game in a five-game run happened to be a 37-7
drubbing of Louisville. The Memphis offense — which looked rather pass-happy
when the season opened — has rediscovered the running game, with Curtis Steele
having romped for more than 100 yards in each of the last three victories. Most
promising of all, the Tigers (even with rookie quarterback Arkelon Hall) don’t
appear intimidated by deficits, having hung tough at home against Arkansas State
after falling behind, then erasing a 10-point UAB lead in Birmingham.
And what of the
Cardinals? They enter the game 2-2, having lost to another pair of
basketball-first universities (Kentucky and Connecticut), while beating
Tennessee Tech and Kansas State. Victor Anderson and Bilal Powell are every bit
the “thunder and lightning” tandem at tailback the Tigers would like to consider
Steele and Charlie Jones. Having given up 220 yards on the ground to UAB,
Memphis will have to close some gaps to keep the Cardinal offense off the field.
Four years is too
long between Tiger-Cardinal clashes. Each program would benefit from gatherings
more frequent than presidential elections or Olympiads. But if Memphis and
Louisville fans are going to be forced to quell the fiery emotions these two
combatants tend to elicit, they’d do well to heed the wisdom of that ancient
Roman sports fan, Ovid: “Bear patiently with a rival.”
