Louisville scores early and often in 73-10 win

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- With Brian Brohm going deep early and often, Steve Kragthorpe’s debut as Louisville coach looked awfully familiar.

Playing with the kind of offensive precision that became the team’s trademark under former coach Bobby Petrino, Louisville blasted overmatched Murray State, 73-10, on Thursday night.

Brohm threw for 375 yards and four touchdowns in just over a half of work, and the Cardinals rolled up 655 yards of offense against the Racers. Murray State, a member of the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), received $300,000 to drive four hours from their campus in southwestern Kentucky to serve as fodder for Kragthorpe, who was hired in January after Petrino bolted to the NFL.

“It’s been a long seven or eight months,” Kragthorpe said. “It was nice to get out there going again. I thought we were pretty clean for the most part.”

Pretty crisp too.

Brohm needed all of one play to find the end zone, passing to Harry Douglas for a 44-yard touchdown on Louisville’s first offensive play.

“A lot of people thought we were going to have a drop-off after we swapped coaches,” Douglas said.

“A lot of people had doubts, but we picked up where we left off last year.”

Brohm completed 16 of 21 passes, many of them to receivers who had little trouble finding open spaces against Murray State’s inexperienced defense.

“We executed well on offense,” Brohm said. “We did a lot of things the right way, but we’ve still got a lot of room for improvement.”

Louisville scored on all but one possession, and the crowd booed when Kragthorpe opted to run the clock out in the final minute with the ball deep in Racers territory.