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LOUISVILLE, Ky. – To appreciate the giddy place where the Louisville Cardinals are today as the newest members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, you must understand where they were 15 years ago.





When Tom Jurich came to town as the new athletic director in October 1997, he inherited a department that was collapsing at an alarming rate.

The basketball program was on NCAA probation and under sanctions. The glory days of the 1980s, when the Cardinals won two national championships, were fading quickly as Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum aged.

The football program was playing its games in a minor-league baseball stadium, although a new football stadium was scheduled to open the following season. But before getting into that new facility, Jurich had to watch Louisville finish a 1-10 train wreck of a season – then he had to fire its young African-American coach.

The non-revenue sports were uniformly underfunded, and most of them were unsuccessful. Their facilities were embarrassing. The school was well behind in meeting gender-equity requirements.

Academics? Louisville was the subject of a "60 Minutes" piece earlier in the decade on its abysmal basketball graduation rate.

[Related: Atlantic Coast Conference raids Big East again, adds Louisville]

Things were so bad that even Louisville's mid-major brethren were appalled. Conference USA schools were actively seeking to boot the Cardinals from the league, citing all the above problems plus the difficulty in getting Louisville to work cooperatively with the rest of the membership. It took an intervention from C-USA commissioner Mike Slive to stop the eviction.

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So this bright and sunny Wednesday, as an urban school of modest academic credentials celebrated its inclusion in the prestigious ACC, feels like a sporting miracle here. Louisville was never a privileged university – its identity was formed as a gritty commuter school without an idyllic campus. It has lacked state flagship status and widespread affection or support outside the city limits. Rural kids don't grow up dreaming of going there and coal barons don't open their wallets for the school. Everything Louisville has gotten, it had to work for.

That's why this sporting miracle was more a matter of unstinting effort and unwavering vision than a karmic kiss. This has been a 15-year battle that Tom Jurich finally won.

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