After a 24-win season, Kelsey didn’t change his philosophy. He built a bigger, longer, more physical Louisville team to address what kept the Cardinals from going farther in March.

Pat Kelsey said his emphasis on defense and toughness in building his Louisville roster shouldn't signal a lack of offensive emphasis.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WDRB+WAVE) — Pat Kelsey won 24 games last season and came away convinced Louisville needed to get bigger.

Not because what he was doing didn’t work. Mostly, it did.

The Cardinals played fast. They scored. They shot the ball. They won their first NCAA Tournament game since 2017.

But when Kelsey studied what kept them from going farther, he kept coming back to the same thing.

“Those big, physical, nasty, football-type teams are the ones we struggled against,” Kelsey said Tuesday at ACC Tipoff. “And you’ve got to be able to meet fire with fire.”

So Louisville went shopping for fire.

The result is a roster that looks noticeably different from Kelsey’s first two at Louisville — longer, bigger and built with far more protection around the rim.

“There’s no question that we were intentional this year as to how we built our roster,” Kelsey said. “There was an emphasis on defense and rebounding, and improving our rim protection and our length and our overall physicality.”

None of this means Kelsey intends to trade Louisville’s pace and offense for wrestling matches. Quite the opposite. He bristled a little Tuesday at the suggestion that the Cardinals have suddenly discovered defense. Kelsey said his practices have always devoted roughly 70 percent of their time to defense.

The philosophy hasn’t changed. The bodies have.

Flory Bidunga, the 6-foot-9 Kansas transfer and reigning Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year, is the most obvious example.

“He’s a space alien defender,” Kelsey said.

And Kelsey didn’t mean only around the basket.

“He affects the game way more than shot blocking defensively,” Kelsey said. “He can guard one through five. If he switches onto a point guard, I don’t care who it is, he can keep him in front of him and contest the shot.”

Bidunga isn’t Louisville’s only addition of length.

Alvaro Folgueiras, a 6-9 forward whose buzzer-beating 3-pointer knocked No. 1 seed Florida out of last season’s NCAA Tournament for Iowa, brings size and offensive flair. Freshman Obinna Ekezie is another long interior presence. Gabe Dynes, the 7-foot-5 transfer from USC, is, in Kelsey’s more technical scouting terminology, “seven-foot-a-million.”

Even Adrian Wooley, the only returning scholarship player from last season, notices the difference when he attacks the basket in practice.

Asked what it’s like seeing Bidunga waiting at the rim, Wooley said, “I really can’t tell you that I’ve played against or played with anybody of his caliber.”

The Cardinals haven’t abandoned offense in assembling all that size.

Kelsey thinks concerns about Louisville’s perimeter shooting are overdone. Wooley can shoot it. So can Jackson Shelstad, Karter Knox and Folgueiras. In Kelsey’s view, there’s still enough shooting on the roster to play the way he wants.

“We didn’t compromise on our ability to score the ball at a high level,” he said.

That is what makes this an unusual kind of Year 3 roster reconstruction.

Louisville isn’t trying to repair a broken program anymore. Kelsey already did that. In two seasons, his teams have won 51 games, played in an ACC Tournament championship game and made the NCAA Tournament twice.

The Cardinals have gone from basketball irrelevance to a program again carrying significant expectations — and significant financial investment.

Now comes the harder part. Going farther.

“If you can win this conference, you can win a national championship,” Kelsey said. “And we’re excited about competing for that.”

He isn’t hiding from that standard.

Asked Tuesday about the considerable amount of money invested in Louisville’s roster and what would constitute getting its money’s worth, Kelsey acknowledged the obvious destination.

“If you win a championship, obviously that would be the end goal,” he said.

But championships aren’t won in October press conferences, and Kelsey isn’t interested in having his players carry the weight of Louisville’s payroll or expectations into every practice.

His message remains relentlessly about the next thing. The next drill. The next practice. The next possession. The results, he says, will take care of themselves.

But he didn’t build this roster without looking back.

Last March in Buffalo, Louisville’s season ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament against Michigan State, 77-69. If you were drawing up the kind of opponent Kelsey was describing, you’d draw up Tom Izzo’s Spartans — big, physical, relentless on the glass, comfortable winning a game in the paint and at the foul line.

Kelsey remembered it when he built this team.

“To take that next step and get over the hump,” he said, “those were two areas we really needed to address.”

Defense and rebounding. Length and physicality. Fire with fire.

Louisville already proved under Kelsey that it can play fast. Now he wants to find out how far the Cardinals can go when they can play big, too.

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CRAWFORD | Pat Kelsey built Louisville to ‘meet fire with fire’ in pursuit of next step