Louisville basketball is having a historically bad season. How will it affect recruiting?

Louisville men’s basketball has never had a worse season in the 109-year history of the program than this one, and there are still at least six games left to play.

The Cardinals are 3-23 overall and 1-14 in Atlantic Coast Conference play.

Dating back to Dec. 20, U of L has lost 14 of its last 15 games, and the program record for most losses in a single season was set three games ago with a 34-point setback at Pittsburgh.

To call head coach Kenny Payne’s first season as Louisville’s head coach a disaster would be putting it mildly, and plenty of retrospectives have already been written about why this season’s on-court product has been so bad.

As of Friday morning, Louisville’s three wins are tied for the least of any NCAA Division I men’s basketball program with California (which owns two conference wins), Green Bay (which also has two conference wins) and Long Island (coached by former UK assistant coach Rod Strickland).

None of these programs have anything close to Louisville’s basketball pedigree or yearly expectations.

But as an embarrassing season winds to an end, and questions arise about the future leadership of the program, it’s worth examining the current situation for Louisville men’s basketball through a recruiting lens.

How much will one horrifically bad season affect U of L’s recruiting going forward?

Louisville’s outlook with 2023 and 2024 recruiting classes

Louisville has two signees in the class of 2023 and one commitment in the class of 2024.

Small forward Kaleb Glenn — ranked as the No. 67 player in the class of 2023 by the 247Sports Composite — and small forward Curtis Williams Jr. — 247Sports Composite’s No. 69 player for the 2023 class — are promising prospects set to join the Cardinals this summer, but they won’t be game-changing pieces upon their arrival.

That title was reserved for one of several top-tier players in this year’s recruiting class that the Cards targeted. But Louisville failed to land top prospects including Xavier Booker (Michigan State), Caleb Foster (Duke), Elmarko Jackson (Kansas), Jared McCain (Duke) Andrej Stojakovic (Stanford), Dusty Stromer (Gonzaga) and DJ Wagner (Kentucky), among others.

The swing-and-miss that stole the headlines for Louisville in the 2023 recruiting cycle was five-star combo guard AJ Johnson, who ultimately signed with Texas. Louisville was one of Johnson’s final post-high school playing options, but he never took a visit to U of L.

In the 2024 cycle, Louisville already has the commitment of three-star point guard TJ Robinson out of New Jersey, but like the two class of 2023 signees, Robinson isn’t viewed as a trajectory-changing commitment.

Several top-ranked 2024 recruits with a Louisville scholarship offer have already made their college commitments and have spurned the Cardinals: Point guards Elliot Cadeau (North Carolina), Rob Wright (Baylor), Labaron Philon (Auburn) and shooting guard Jamari Phillips (Arizona) all appear to be off the board.

Louisville’s 2024 recruiting efforts figure to be centered around a trio of small forwards: Karter Knox (a Kentucky legacy recruit who has strong interest from the Wildcats), Carter Bryant (who visited Louisville in November) and Trentyn Flowers, whom Payne and Louisville assistant coach Nolan Smith watched in person earlier this month in Frankfort.

None of these players are viewed as locks to commit to Louisville, especially if uncertainty exists with who will coach the Cardinals in 2024.

Just last week, Rob Cassidy, who covers recruiting nationally for Rivals, wrote about the 2024 recruiting cycle and the effect of Louisville’s losing on the Cardinals’ ability to recruit that class.

In the immediate future, Louisville and Payne will have to rely on transfer portal success — something that didn’t happen last season — to improve on-court results, and with it the chances of landing a five-star player in 2024.

For his part, Payne has already addressed questions about potential recruiting ramifications from a bad 2022-23 season.

“You have to look past where it is today and see where it’s gonna be in the future,” Payne said in November. “You come here to change what’s been broken. Let’s fix it, together.”

Payne continues recruiting efforts despite losing

Last week, the Herald-Leader spent time at the Overtime Elite professional basketball league in Atlanta, which is home to a plethora of basketball talent, including some of the top recruits in the 2023 and 2024 classes.

Naasir Cunningham is one of those players. The five-star small forward recently trimmed his list of college choices to five schools: Duke, Kansas, Memphis, Rutgers and UCLA.

While Louisville was never a factor in his recruitment, Cunningham can still provide insight into the mindset of a top college basketball prospect.

How much stock does he put in a program’s current on-court performance when evaluating a school?

“That’s definitely something I pay attention to,” Cunningham said. “See how their play style is, see how I fit in their flow, see how their coach coaches, see if they’re being a successful, winning team or if they need help.”

During the Under Armour Next Elite 24 event in Chicago last summer, the Herald-Leader asked several top recruits (including Cadeau, the 2024 point guard who picked North Carolina over Louisville, among others) about the importance of recent NCAA Tournament performances when assessing schools.

“I love winning and I take pride in winning,” Cadeau said last August. “So I definitely want to go to a winning organization.”

While the Cardinals are still yet to land a notable recruit or transfer with Payne as head coach, U of L has maintained an active presence on the recruiting trail.

This was particularly evident earlier this month in Frankfort when Payne and Smith were courtside to watch Flowers — a five-star 2024 small forward — and Billy Richmond, a four-star class of 2024 shooting guard.

Both players took an unofficial visit to Louisville on Feb. 4 for the Cardinals’ home loss to Florida State.

If they stayed long enough that Saturday afternoon inside the KFC Yum Center, they would have gotten to experience the traditional playing of Wolfmother’s “Joker & the Thief” during the second-half under-8 timeout.

Those moments haven’t come with the same intensity this season, as Louisville has, on average, filled only 55.5% of the KFC Yum Center’s 22,000-person capacity through eight ACC home games.

Perhaps the smaller crowds allow the lyrics of the song to reverberate a bit louder in the arena, with easily envisioned parallels to Louisville’s recruiting hopes.

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