NEW ORLEANS — University of Louisville players acknowledge Kentucky’s résumé makes it the favorite in today’s Final Four matchup, but the Cardinals don’t feel like underdogs.
That would imply that they don’t belong with Kansas, Ohio State and the Wildcats as the last four teams playing in the NCAA Tournament. After winning the Big East Tournament and the West Regional, they believe they belong with the best.
“We’ve cut down the nets twice, and I don’t want my guys to feel inferior,” coach Rick Pitino said. “It’s easy to feel inferior to Kentucky because they go on the draft board all the time. … You don’t want that feeling going into it because you’ll play like inferior players. We don’t want that underdog mentality.”
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If not underdogs, they’re at least underappreciated.
“People aren’t giving us a chance at all,” said senior Kyle Kuric, U of L’s leading scorer. “We won games just like everybody else, so we’re not content.”
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Pitino said earlier in the week that the Cards would have to play a Villanova-type game, a reference to that team’s 66-64 upset of Georgetown in the 1985 national championship game. As a No. 8 seed, Nova played a near-perfect game and shot 78.6 percent from the field.
But the key to that victory was the fact that those Wildcats talked openly about not being intimidated by the heavily favored Hoyas despite losing to them twice in the regular season.
U of L senior Chris Smith was born 2½ years after that game. Kuric said he thinks he’s seen some video clips from it. But both embody the spirit of Villanova’s fight.
“Everybody will call us underdogs,” Smith said. “We don’t think were underdogs; we’re expecting to win this game. We’re not going to let our confidence down and let our fans down, you know, even ourselves. We’re just going to go out there, play hard, play our style of basketball.”
