The Tulane Green Wave need player leadership to rise to the top and guide them to a win.
There’s little that football players hate more than losing, and the Tulane Green Wave will look to turn around a bad season start against the South Alabama Jaguars in style this weekend.
Perhaps representing the city of New Orleans in some impeccable Mardi Gras themed uniforms will infuse some style points into the team donning them.
But the uniforms are secondary to the goal at hand, which is winning the first game of the year for a team that didn’t come into this season with any thoughts about losing.
For linebacker Dickson Agu, winning is really all he’s been accustomed to Uptown, and that standard is something this team is still fighting to keep.
“Nobody came here to lose,” Agu said on Wednesday. “Nobody came here to be less than we were last year. We’re just emphasizing going back to the basics and doing us.”
It was a game that was hard to find any good in, but the fight on the defensive side was palpable.
It was a game where you certainly missed a guy like Sam Howard, who would have been all over his teammates on the sideline in last Saturday’s debacle.
As linebacker Chris Rodgers put it last week, a guy like Howard isn’t exactly replaceable, and it left a major void on the defensive side of the ball to fill as really the heart and soul of the team.
The linebacker corps really took that on as a whole to step up with leadership leaving.
The player leadership needs to show up more on the sidelines this weekend.
Starting on the road is hard. Especially when a team goes down like Tulane and looked so unsure of themselves.
Hopefully, the lack of a delay and their routines at home will make a slight difference in their mentality and readiness heading into Saturday’s contest.
It’ll be one that won’t have a running back anything close to the caliber of running back Nate Sheppard – and that’ll probably be the case for the rest of the Green Wave’s season.
But Duke quarterback Walker Eget was pretty ineffective and entirely immobile under center last Saturday.
Fans likely remember last year’s contest that saw quarterback Bishop Davenport torch the Tulane defense quite a bit, throwing for 231 yards and two touchdowns while rushing for 63 yards and a score on the ground.
That’ll be much more of a challenge for this defense than the Blue Devils’ attack outside Sheppard, though they won’t have wide receiver Devin Voisin who gave them fits last season.
The defense needs to fill the right gaps, play sound, have their eyes right. Things that are entirely fixable if they’re accountable to do so.
