ESPN College Football

One silly complaint Louisville fans have leveled at Steve Kragthorpe is that he's too nice or not fiery enough.

They should have seen the coach in the locker room or on the plane ride home Saturday after his Cardinals lost to Syracuse, 28-21. Insiders say Kragthorpe was angry enough to make Bobby Petrino blush. Even on Monday, the normally-upbeat Kragthorpe seemed more agitated than usual.

"I'm extremely upset with the way we played," he said. "I'm as upset as I've ever been. I'm sick to my stomach that we lost that football game."

Syracuse upset Louisville last year in Papa John's Cardinal Stadium, but that was a turmoil-laden Cardinals team still moping from the previous week's loss to rival Kentucky. This year, Louisville was riding a three-game winning streak and coming off a momentum-building victory over South Florida.

And it wasn't like they came out flat. The Cardinals opened Saturday's game with a 93-yard touchdown drive -- the first time all season they'd scored on their opening possession against a FBS team -- and then forced a Syracuse three-and-out on defense.

"We were woken up from the start of the game," Kragthorpe said. "It wasn't like we walked out there sleepwalking and all of a sudden it's 21-0 and we're going, 'Oh, hell, what just happened?'"

Instead, players said they let down their guard a little after the strong start. In some ways, that's understandable. Syracuse was getting booed by its own fans and was staring at the possibility of a 1-7 record and the firing of its coach.

But the Cardinals don't have enough talent or depth to take anything for granted. And despite their gaudy rush defense statistics, they couldn't stop Curtis Brinkley running right at them. Brinkley had 166 yards on 33 carries. Louisville's defensive stats were fool's gold, because only one opponent, Connecticut, had really even tried to run the ball between the tackles this season. And UConn had to go to the air in the second half after falling behind.

So it's not great news that Pittsburgh and LeSean McCoy await this weekend in Heinz Field.

"We have to do a much better job this week, because we're going to see the same type of attack," Kragthorpe said. "They're going to line up and try to run it down our throats."

Now 5-3 and 1-2 in the Big East, the Cardinals' season could go a number of ways. They could conceivably be underdogs in their their four remaining games (at Pitt, Cincinnati, West Virginia and at Rutgers). If they play the way they did at Syracuse, everyone around the program will be in a bad mood.

"That was definitely not the outcome we wanted, but we'll bounce back," quarterback Hunter Cantwell said. "We'll learn from it and be a better football team."