Pat Kelsey admits he never thought Louisville would reach heights of first season

When head coach Pat Kelsey first got to the Louisville Cardinals, he knew it was going to be a massive rebuild. Now, with his first regular season in the rearview mirror, things went better than even he could have expected.

While Kelsey tends to expect the worst as a coach, he knows that this season has been an excellent one. He just doesn’t want that success to end with the regular season.

“I told somebody the other day,” Pat Kelsey said. “I’m convinced we’re gonna lose every single game. It’s just how I prepare. I think that fear of not preparing and not putting our guys in the best position puts me in this maniacal mode to kind of do what I do. Sometimes your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. You’ve got to kind of be able to balance that a little bit. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably not very healthy. I’d would always see all the ways that number 42 [Maxime Raynaud] for Stanford could have 90 on us because he can’t get 90 because nobody ever does, but he’s a problem.”

Louisville struggled as a program under previous head coach Kenny Payne. In two seasons, he went 12-52 there, including an 8-24 finish the year before Pat Kelsey took over. Now 25-6 and 18-2 in ACC play, the Cardinals finished second in the ACC in the regular season.

“So, no. I never thought that we win a certain number of games or this or that,” Kelsey said. “I have a great — I have a confidence and a belief in who we are, what we do as a staff, and what we do in terms of building our program. So, it usually works out for us. I didn’t, I didn’t think we’d be in this position right now, but it’s been so much fun.”

Still to come are the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. Those are both situations that Kelsey believes his team has been working toward and he wants to succeed in proving he was the right hire at Louisville.

“I was just kind of Joe Bag of Donuts mid-major guy, and Josh Heird took a chance on me, and the fear of letting your guys down in preparation is one of those things I think about, but we were just working your butt off every day to make Josh look good and that he made a good hire that motivates me every single day. He’s a great leader, become a great confidant, friend of mine. He’s doing an unbelievable job leading this athletic department. So, when I sit here today when I don’t know who the next game is it is a little bit of that since that — and he could have hired a million other people that probably are more qualified than I, he took a chance on me,” Kelsey said.

“Now it’s the next thing. Let’s go to the ACC tournament and work our butts off to be able to climb up the ladder and cut down nets. We just have to win that first game against whoever the heck that is [against].”

The ACC Tournament is set to begin on March 11th. There, Louisville has the two-seed and a double-bye before playing their first game on March 13th.