Tulane and Duke both enter the season looking to shut down the other's top offensive weapon, but the Green Wave’s might be harder to solve.
As the Tulane Green Wave prepare to take on the Duke Blue Devils for the 2026 college football season opener on Saturday afternoon, they do so likely carrying a similar game plan to the attack by the Blue Devils.
Both teams will be trying to take away the other’s best player on offense. But where the Green Wave may have the edge is the fact that the answer might not be so simple on their end compared to Duke.
Tulane and the Blue Devils will both benefit from the element of surprise to a degree with both offenses debuting new skill players and new starting quarterbacks.
But while the Green Wave can unfold as much of their offensive attack as they’d like to in Week 1, the Duke offense may be a bit more one dimensional.
Blue Devils’ starting quarterback Walker Eget suffered a knee injury late in the 2025 season after tearing his ACL in 2024 and missed all of Duke’s spring camp after undergoing surgery on that right knee and was spotted in a brace at times during their fall camp.
A lot of their offseason was dedicated to keeping Eget healthy. It’s not clear if he’ll be 100% by the season opener, and there’s no benefit in Duke revealing any of that.
But even if he comes out fully ready to go, that was a crucial amount of time missed with his receivers that Tulane quarterback Zeon Chriss-Gremillion took full advantage of.
By nature, it makes sense for the Blue Devils to lean on their bets player in running back Nate Sheppard, who is coming off of an incredible freshman season.
He rushed for over 1,000 yards, becoming the program’s only 1,000-yard freshman rusher.
So, for the Green Wave, it makes sense to subscribe to the Bill Belichick philosophy of taking away your opponent’s best player.
It’ll be an immediate test for Tulane’s younger, unproven defensive line.
But if they do that early, and that could be as simple as numerically shutting him down, then that puts pressure right away on Eget to perform when he hasn’t been fully healthy and with a receiving corps he missed an entire spring with and one which is much more unproven than the Green Wave’s room.
It’s not clear at all if there’s any particular player for Tulane that that rule would apply to, and it may be a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s not to say the Wave don’t have talent, but rather, that it’s a deeper and harder of a puzzle to solve up in Durham Saturday afternoon.
