I wasn’t looking too bad until Louisville’s fourth-quarter run put the Deacons away for a middle-of-the-road 24-13 win. Oh well.
The Deacons’ defense, holding to form, forced relatively few punts and limited the number of long plays against it. The fifth-ranked Cards, averaging 38.9 points and 476.8 yards per regular-season game, generally found their toughest adversary to be the NCAA’s new clock rules, which deprive teams of five or six plays a game. But Wake was not a particularly willing accomplice.
If you had told Grobe that he would hold the Cards more than 10 points below their scoring average and that the Deacs would recover three fumbles, he would have been reasonably happy with his odds. After all, the Wake defense tied for the national lead in interceptions, so perhaps there could be one or two of those.
But unlike Georgia Tech’s Reggie Ball in the ACC title game a month ago, Cardinals quarterback Brian Brohm didn’t throw an interception. Brohm went 24-for-34 for 312 yards, a total surpassed in the Orange Bowl’s 73-year history by only Tom Brady of Michigan and Matt Leinart of Southern Cal. Perhaps you have heard of them.
While we were glued to the Orange Bowl, little did we know another potential upset was brewing down in Raleigh.
