With kickoff rapidly approaching, fans, coaches, and talking heads alike are beginning to narrow their sights on what’s ahead. Gone are the days of the offseason where we’re breaking down games off in the distance like Syracuse in November. Instead, our focus has shifted to Notre Dame. Along with this tunnel vision comes the extreme attention to details. Coach Satterfield talked about it on Monday where he touched on how, especially in the early part of the season, teams make a lot of mistakes, and that Louisville is trying to limit as many of those mistakes as possible.

Satterfield even went as far to mention the Florida-Miami game this past weekend with the bevy mistakes and “sloppiness” we saw when it came to basic things tackling and pre-snap penalties. Regarding the first game of the season, Satterfield said, “You don’t look as sharp as you’d like to look. And as a coach that’s always something that you’re shaking your head at with the false start penalties…That’s the one thing that we’re trying to harp on so we can play a clean game…It’s huge.”

Unfortunately, Louisville fans know this all too well. How can anyone forget the 2017 season opener against Purdue where Louisville had ten (10!) false start penalties? Little things like limiting false starts are what great coaching staffs take pride in and separate good teams from great teams. In UofL’s case, this season, ticky-tack things like pre-snap errors can be the difference between winning 2-3 games or flirting with bowl eligibility.

So, if great staffs are experts when it comes to details, do Satterfield and Co. fall into that category?

According to ESPN, after joining the FBS in 2014, App State’s total penalties committed decreased considerably each season for their first three years. In 2014 the Mountaineers ranked 27th overall in total penalties committed (88), then 43rd (84) in ‘15, and then 56th (79) in’16. Louisville, on the other hand, ranked 25th (90), 12th (97), and 5th (101) over the same time frame. As App State’s discipline improved, Louisville’s deteriorated.

However, App State did have a lousy 2017 season where they ranked 21st with 91 penalties committed. They improved last year, though, ranking 44th with 83 penalties. While App State committed fewer penalties than Louisville in every year except for 2017, these numbers still aren’t eye-popping, nor are they terribly encouraging.

But this got me thinking about how there are a lot of things that are out of a coach’s control when it comes to penalties like personal fouls. This made me decide to look into the penalties that Satterfield stresses the most and has the most ability to coach-up and somewhat control: False Starts.

Much to my chagrin, I could not find any database that tracks the numbers for each individual penalty. So because I hate myself, I combed through every game and penalty that Louisville has had in the last three years, as well as Dwayne Ledford’s three seasons at NCST, and the two FBS seasons Satterfield and Ledford were on staff together at App State, scouring for false start penalties. What I found was nothing short of arousing.

The bad news is that in the last three years Louisville has committed 81 false start penalties, highlighted by the 2016 Houston and 2017 Purdue debacles. But you already knew that.