Brown: After celebrating Jeff Brohm's return, Louisville football fans must show patience

Louisville’s Jeff Brohm just coached the last game at L&N Stadium where his performance won’t be judged, scrutinized, even questioned during Friday’s Red-White scrimmage to conclude spring drills.

Honeymoons are much shorter nowadays, even for a homegrown player taking over his alma mater.

Brohm has done everything right in cultivating goodwill for the program. He’s accessible. He’s the type of coach that’s so likely to be seen out at a restaurant or grocery store that folks might get bored by it. Brohm’s embraced all that comes with being the head coach at U of L in ways former coach Scott Satterfield either never understood or never chose to during his four seasons.

The public announcer beamed “welcome to a new era of Louisville Cardinals football,” prior to the start Friday as a few hundred fans disregarded the rain to check out the new squad.

Brohm wanted the game to emulate what it’ll be like in the fall, and that started with his approach. He paced the sideline, constantly perusing his laminated play-calling sheet.

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It was a far cry from the coaches who take such a casual approach to the spring game that they delegate to assistant coaches to call plays and use a microphone to comment to the crowd during the game.

Brohm was so in-tune to the action on the field that he didn’t react quick enough when a run headed toward his sideline and he got wiped out by linebacker Jack Reiger trying to make a tackle.

Ultimately, how long that warm, fuzzy, euphoria lasts from Brohm choosing to return home will depend on how fast he wins games. People don’t want to hear about patience, but it’s probably going to take just that to get the Cardinals playing at an ACC championship level.

“Without question we want to be competitive every week and play a great brand of football, and sometimes that equals a lot of wins and sometimes, maybe not as much as you want, but we want to win,” Brohm said.

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We’ve seen just how fast good will erodes for a beloved former player. Kenny Payne struggled as a first-time head men’s basketball coach and nothing in his background as a member of U of L’s 1986 national championship team could pacify the growing anger and apathy forged from a 4-28 record.

By season’s end, there were a small, but vocal, contingent of U of L fans treating him like his name was Steve Kragthorpe.

Brohm should avoid having that kind of season, for many reasons, primarily because he’s done this before. His first season at Western Kentucky he went 8-5, capped off by a win in the Bahamas Bowl. His first year at Purdue he took a team that went 3-9 the previous year and posted a 7-6 record.

U of L will get arguably its two toughest non-conference opponents at home when Notre Dame (Oct. 7) and rival Kentucky (Nov. 25) come to town.

The Cards’ ACC schedule is a favorable one. Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina are the only league teams that figure to be ranked in the preseason top 25 polls, and they don’t face any of that trio in the regular season.

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U of L will play quite a few teams that will likely be predicted for the bottom half of the league like Georgia Tech, Boston College, Virginia and Virginia Tech. Brohm’s not taking that for granted, though.

“We've got to go back and continue to watch last year and see, you know, what this conference is all about because sometimes, when you're a little new to it, you may not know exactly the ins and outs, like we maybe did when we were in the Big Ten,” Brohm said. “So I just think that there's a lot of work that needs to go into it. Nothing's going to automatically happen.”

U of L won big in bringing Brohm back home. Now try to give him some time.

Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @CLBrownHoops.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville football 2023: Patience required as Jeff Brohm era begins