Mississippi State ended Louisville’s 2017-18 season in 3 different major sports

Mississippi State beat Louisville in the TaxSlayer Bowl (yes, it’s really called that). The odds of that aren’t so long. The ACC and SEC share a handful of bowl ties, depending on the year, and each team had made bowls for the previous seven years, so they were kind of bound to play at some point.

Then Louisville’s proud men’s basketball team fell all the way to the NIT amid Rick Pitino’s scandalacious firing. The odds of that are ... way longer. There, the Cardinals lost to the relatively lowly Bulldogs in Louisville.

Days after that! In the Women’s Final Four, MSU ran away from Louisville in overtime. This matchup in iso isn’t surprising, since both are elites.

But put all three of those odds together, and you have a really long number. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to calculate.

It gets slightly worse! Louisville is now 0-5 against MSU in football, 0-1 in women’s hoops, and only 3-2 all-time in men’s hoops, which isn’t quite what you’d expect from a program of U of L’s stature.

It gets way worse! The two basketball games were national semifinals. MSU cost Louisville a trip to play Notre Dame in the women’s title game and a shot at minor redemption against Penn State in the NIT. The bowl game also ended Lamar Jackson’s career with a second straight ugly bowl loss.

Onward to softball, where MSU and Louisville are pretty likely to make the College World Series. We’re gonna keep doing this until the Cardinals get it right.