Louisville football 2025 position grades: Offense

With the 2025 Louisville football season officially behind us, it’s time to grade each position group. 

The Cardinals ultimately finished the season going 9-4, hitting the nine-win mark for the third straight season under Jeff Brohm, and capped it off with a 27-22 Bush’s Boca Raton Bowl of Beans win over Toledo. 

First, we’ll grade Louisville’s offense based on position room. 

RELATED: Obituary — The 2025 Louisville football season 

Quarterback — C

Miller Moss would be the first to tell you that he didn’t have the season he wanted. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that the senior quarterback was relatively average throughout the season. He threw 16 touchdowns and seven interceptions while completing just over 63 percent of his passes for 2,679 yards. 

In the games where Louisville needed Moss to step up and put the offense on his shoulders, he simply couldn’t. Over a three-game stretch to start November, which included two home losses, Moss threw two interceptions and just one touchdown. In this stretch, Louisville was down two of its top running backs, and the lack of explosive offense ultimately doomed the Cards’ season. 

I’m giving Moss a C. I’ve expressed my impressed nature of how he’s handled these last few months and rallied this team for the final two games, but the play just never elevated a middling Cardinals offense. 

Runningback — A-

Keeping a combination of Isaac and Keyjuan Brown, as well as Duke Watson, will be a priority for the staff this offseason. Despite only playing in nine games, Isaac Brown was the only FBS rusher to reach at least 800 yards while playing in single-digit games. 

The 5-foot-9 freshman only has to stay in college one more year before being a sure-fire NFL draft selection, and he is as explosive as he is hard to bring down. Keyjuan Brown proved to be a good duo in the backfield, setting career bests in carries, yards, and touchdowns. 

Keyjuan even fought through surgery to play against Toledo in Bush’s Boca Raton Bowl of Beans. At 210 pounds, Bama is a heavier-set back that is good on the goal-line and had at least four runs of 30+ yards this season. Keyjuan ended the year on a five-game streak of at least 10 carries and 90+ yards. That’s production you want to keep. 

Wide receiver — B+ 

Chris Bell’s season deserves its praise, but nearing 1,000 yards and catching over 70 balls is about what we expected in his senior season. In the slot, Caullin Lacy also had a solid season, but never eclipsed a 100-yard receiving total in a single game. 

I just don’t think the “others” contributed enough to bump the receiving room up to an A. TreyShun Hurry and Dacari Collins were both supposed to be proven additions in the spring portal window, but never asserted themselves as a reliable wide receiver No. 3. By the season’s end, it was Antonio Meeks who caught eight balls and a touchdown in the final three weeks of the year. 

Tight end — B-

Since the arrival of Jeff Brohm, Louisville’s tight end room has been short of the previous production pass catchers at the position that he saw during his time at Purdue and Western Kentucky. But, I still don’t think this year’s tandem of Nate Kurisky and Jaleel Skinner was something to hang heads about. 

Skinner was fourth on the team in receiving yards (204) and third in catches (21), while Kurisky was his usual self after returning from a broken hand early in the season. Kurisky has already decided to move on and will enter his name into the transfer portal, while Skinner could spend his final year of eligibility at Louisville. Position coach Ryan Wallace will be heading to Oregon State, and in his three years with the Cardinals, his room hasn’t had a top-level talent spanning over more than a season. This year, Wallace played the hand he was dealt. 

Offensive line — C

If there could have been a saving grace for Miller Moss, it would have been having one of the better offensive lines in the ACC. That just never happened. Louisville’s front five was without its best tackle, Trevonte Sylvester, for the first month of the season, and it proved to be an early setback for the offense, as the Cardinals couldn’t establish the run against teams like James Madison, Pittsburgh, and Virginia. With the return of Sylvester and the ultimate decision to put Lance Robinson and a combination of Jordan Church or Mahamane Moussa at the guard spots, the line was eventually able to create holes for running backs, but never strung consistent performances together. 

The Virginia game was one of the worst of the year for the offensive line, then the group followed it up with its best, an upset over No. 2 Miami. The same could be said in the final two weeks of the regular season, when the offense failed to score a touchdown at SMU and then put up 41 points against Kentucky. 

This was a veteran group with four seniors starting by the end of the season, which was an average group in the ACC, a step back from last year’s, which was one of the conference’s best.