Louisville was down 49 at the half to Rutgers last night. If you missed the first half as we did, you tuned into the second half and fully expected Steve Kragthorpe to read his death poem into his headset, kneel, plunge his tanto into his side, and commit ritual suicide on the sidelines.

Unfortunately for Kragthorpe-san, it’s hard to commit suicide when Davon Sharp and the rest of the Rutgers team is doing the job for you:

Louisville is standing by their man for now, but Louisville’s pile of hot fail is accumulating like so many yellowed toenails stuck in the shag carpet of mediocrity. They went 1-5 in the Big East, yielding one of those to newly-fired GERG and Syracuse. They suffered through a macabre series of injuries this year, yes–they only took 25 players to Rutgers, and presumably expected the worst–but their late collapse was well short of a Thermopylae-style last stand. The Cardinals have looked mediocre to awful at times under Kragthorpe, and your trend graph is flowing ever-downward at this rate for his overall performance at the school.

You know a game is bad when ESPN keeps showing shots of the Lincoln Tunnel on commercial outros. You also know your defense had no shot when you let Mike Teel throw for seven touchdowns in his last game as a Scarlet Knight. On the upside, the slack time in the second half allowed for Chris Fowler to admit he’d never been to a local greasy spoon before midnight or sober, basically, and that was almost worth the agony of watching the second half.