The Championship mentality starts with the Head Coach.
41-9 Petrino needs to kick Petrino 2.0 to the curb.
Its Louisville's time.
Ha ha ha ha ha! 41-9 Petrino was in C-USA and Big East, where Louisville had among the best resources in terms of facilities, athletics tradition and recruiting base. They DEFINITELY were in the top 3, even in the Big East. In the ACC? Not so much, when there are the likes of FSU, Miami, Clemson and even Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, not to mention in certain contexts UNC, Pitt, UVa and Syracuse. To put it another way: Petrino didn't go 41-9 in the SEC did he? Of course not, because he was at Arkansas, which doesn't have the resources that Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee or even Auburn has. Petrino's high water mark in the SEC was winning the SEC West (and losing in the SEC title game) and then losing in the Sugar Bowl to the same Ohio State program that Dabo Swinney is undefeated against.
Those schools can regularly contend for the top 10-20 just by having decent coaches and recruiting in-state plus neighboring states. Meanwhile, Louisville has to go into Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas etc. to get kids that a lot of times the likes of FSU and UGA overlook. Case in point: the Gators and 'Canes didn't really have much interest in Lamar Jackson because he is a dual threat/spread QB and the big Florida schools - including truthfully FSU - prefer dropback passers. (Plus the 'Noles had Francis, who was a higher rated recruit than Jackson. If you saw the bowl game against Michigan, during which FSU purposefully chose not to do much in the way of option or designed QB runs for Francis so he could attack Michigan as a dropback passer, you saw that Francis was highly rated for a reason. Not saying that Francois is better than Jackson, obviously, only that FSU preferred Francois to Jackson in the recruiting process because Francois was highly rated and was deserving of his rating ... Jackson was very likely undervalued by the recruiting services and such.)
C-USA and the Big East, you can regularly win with Petrino's scheme and Louisville talent. But Petrino had real problems with the better teams in the SEC during his run there. And now that the ACC is almost as good as the SEC was in the 2000s (Saban, Meyer and Miles in the SEC at the same time) he is going to run into the same sorts of issues. Had Louisville been in ACC about 5-10 years ago, when the crop of coaches were weaker (before Fisher and Swinney figured things out and when Beamer had lost it at Virginia Tech) or the era before when it was even worse and the ACC had like 8-5 conference champions ... remember that the ACC went like 3-12 in BCS games or something - then sure, maybe Petrino would have been real successful. But to compete with Clemson, FSU and the programs that I believe that Pitt, Miami and Virginia Tech are going to be in 2-3 years with their new coaches, Petrino is going to need to go back to some of the power running that his better Louisville (Michael Bush, Eric Shelton right?) and Arkansas teams had, as well as getting much better players on both interior lines. Louisville didn't only get handled up front by the likes of LSU and Clemson, but also against HOUSTON, a group of 5 school. 41-9 Petrino isn't going to "come back" until Petrino gets 41-9 Power 5 talent to compete.
