The Gauntlet: How Tulane Football Builds Player Leadership and Champions in One Hour

New Orleans, La. -- College football can be won and lost in a singular moment, by one error, and the odds of that increase as the game goes on as physical exhaustion leads to mental mistakes. The Tulane Green Wave are working to beat their offseason program that is designed to prevent just that. It also builds real player leadership and fortifies a culture. That’s clear now after observing an attempt to beat the Gauntlet on Friday morning.

Without watching the Gauntlet, it’s not obvious how a series of drills can hit all those marks on and off the field. If you want real player leadership, there needs to be building blocks. If they’re only tied to football, then it’s just situational leadership. Stripping that all back, and frankly, basing it on a primal feeling of literal exhaustion, builds a foundation and actually feels like shared adversity.

In today’s college football, it almost felt necessary to strengthen a group of solid returners and a considerable number of strangers. Half of the lesson learned was who is fully returning on the Green Wave football team, and trying to pick out some of the newcomers, as they all competed in black workout gear with their names in a much smaller font. It was an hour of controlled chaos. It took a moment – and a list of rules – to understand how to beat the Gauntlet, led by director of strength and conditioning Colin Kenyon and the new coaching staff.

The team has one hour to beat it with no mistakes. Some are obvious, like stepping over the line as a false start. The Green Wave did an episode on their “Welcome to Uptown” series last offseason that explains the rules in depth. But in essence, the players divided into six stations with agility drills that seem simple, yet physically grueling, from the outside, and rotate every few minutes. In that hour, they must hit several benchmarks. First, they must complete each station in a 2:45 increment. After a short break, they then must hit 1:45 per station. Each time they make a mistake, they must complete three up-downs. Those add up on a time penalty against the one-hour allotment. If they manage to get through the first two rounds, they then must complete each station to perfection in 1:30 each with no up-downs or “call backs,” which is what mistakes are called.

The final round is the “fourth quarter.” If they have no mistakes, they pass; even one mistake, and they fail the station. They can try to rotate each station once more in the final round – if they have time. They often run out of it in the middle of the fourth quarter due to penalties that added up. As the hour ticked on, it became clear how mentally and physically draining these drills were, and what they strengthen on and off the field.

That all corresponded with an increased set of urgency as the hour went on. It started out quiet. Guys started to lead each other towards the end. That needs to start from the beginning to beat the Gauntlet. But there were some good moments that stuck out of players pulling their group together to lock in or helping line up teammates’ hips in line as they approached the start cone. They didn’t beat it on Friday. But they grew closer as a team. That sense of urgency will be muscle memory when the fourth quarter of the season opener hits. If something goes wrong, they’ll have the rhythm down of how to handle adversity without checking out or turning on each other. They’ll have natural leaders who felt the instinct to step up in the Gauntlet.