The Tulane Green Wave are getting a rematch against the first team they lost to this season in Ole Miss. It's not the same Green Wave team that went to Oxford in September. Here's why.
The Tulane Green Wave will have a rematch against the Ole Miss Rebels in the first round of the College Football Playoff. Anyone counting them out based on the results in September hasn’t been following along with this Green Wave team.
That was a team with over 60 new players on the roster, one whose starting quarterback showed up a month before that Sept. 20 contest. The Rebels punched Tulane in the mouth, there’s no way around that. But that was a coach-led team who didn’t have a reason to play for one another besides sharing a logo to that point. The December Green Wave is a player-led championship team playing inspired football for each other.
That can’t be accounted for schematically, especially by a team without their head coach. There’s certainly the risk of the unknown in how aggressive interim coach Pete Golding will be with in-game decisions versus his predecessor in Lane Kiffin who called the September matchup. But they’ve also had weeks off to fester and gain rust. Tulane, in the meantime, played their most complete, dominant game of the season since Week 1 in their American Conference Championship win over North Texas.
Now, Jon Sumrall will be off to the Florida Gators once the playoff run ends. But having that leader in place is important. As is the last two months of an offense learning to click with quarterback Jake Retzlaff. For perspective, he threw his first passing touchdown of the season to a wide receiver in that September loss.
The 45-10 loss was 23-3 at the start of the second half. People may forget that the defense pitched a shutout in the third quarter. It was an important growth moment for a unit that looked like strangers in the first half. There wasn’t enough adversity this team had faced together to be able to surmount that deficit. But they showed signs of grit out of the halftime tunnel.
They hadn’t gotten embarrassed by the UTSA Roadrunners and completely flipped their standard on the field yet. They hadn’t had to call a player-led meeting to lock in for their first conference title together. They hadn’t had time to buy in to the team response of “good” in the face of adversity when it all piled on their face at once in Oxford, on a battered team on their third gauntlet game of Power Four matchups in non-conference play.
There’s no surprise this time of the speed of the game that the Rebels build their offense on. They know how quarterback Trinidad Chambliss can beat them. This pass rush has grown alongside a secondary that has been tested by multiple Air Raid offenses. The offense hadn’t found what they had in Jamauri McClure yet or gotten down a rhythm with Retzlaff. They hadn’t become champions yet. And they’re quietly a dangerous matchup.