Inside Tulane’s Near-Miraculous Turnaround That Almost Never Happened

The Green Wave have survived quite a bit of adversity—including two administrative attempts to shut down football. Now they’re on their way to one of their best seasons in program history.

NEW ORLEANS—In one of the biggest accomplishments of his life, Angus Lind convinced a group of LSU fans in the spring of 2002 to help save Tulane football. Dozens of folks, some even wearing the purple-and-gold gear of Tulane’s in-state rival, stood along St. Charles Avenue holding signs that read, “Honk if you love Tulane!”

“Twenty years later, who’d a thunk it?” says Lind, a 78-year-old longtime Green Wave supporter and a former sportswriter for The Times Picayune. “Now, people are talking crazy talk about us going to a big bowl game!”

On the 20-year anniversary of Tulane’s attempt to completely shutter its football program or, at the very least, demote it to Division III, the No. 17 Green Wave is having one of its best seasons in the modern era of college football.

Tulane is 8–1, the highest-ranked team from the Group of 5 and leading the American Athletic Conference. The team won a game at Kansas State, is barreling toward its first appearance in the league title game and, with a win there, could very well secure a trip to its first major bowl since 1939.

It is a stunning and rare accomplishment for this small academic institution nestled among the oak trees of New Orleans’s Uptown neighborhood. For decades now overshadowed by both the city in which it resides and the SEC powerhouse to its north, Tulane’s outburst this season is even more shocking when considering its past—both recent and old.

The Green Wave is in the midst of one of the biggest one-year turnarounds in college football history—it went 2–10 last season—and has hit the eight-win mark for just the third time in the last 42 years. The program has survived cataclysmic natural disasters and two administrative attempts to shut down football within the last half-century.

If that’s not enough, the team fights attendance issues with a base of mostly out-of-state alums, is still chided for its decision to leave the SEC nearly 60 years ago and has strict admission requirements in the age of the transfer portal.

“It takes a unique bird to have success here,” says Troy Dannen, in his seventh year as athletic director.

“Let me tell you historically how bad it is,” Dannen continues. “The football coach is the first coach to have played in more than one bowl game and the basketball coach here has bonuses in his contract for winning six league games.”

On Saturday afternoon, the Green Wave, 5–0 in the American, hosts No. 22 UCF (7–2, 5–1) in a historic affair. It will be the first Tulane home game pitting ranked teams since 1949, when No. 13 LSU beat the SEC champion, 10th-ranked Green Wave 21–0 in an upset that, in many ways, began the steady decline of the football program.

Lind, then 5-years old, attended that game with his father Angus Sr., who earned two free tickets by selling season tickets for Tulane from a wooden booth near the university’s campus.

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The 1949 loss to rival LSU squashed Tulane’s trip to the Sugar Bowl and began the university administration’s attempt to downsize football. The school proceeded to stop offering the allotted number of NCAA scholarships, slash coaching salaries and require athletes to take more rigorous courses. Tulane left the SEC 16 years later, was a single vote away from disbanding football in the mid 1980s before shutting down its basketball program for five years over a points-shaving scandal.

“Tulane has got some good history, along with some really bad history,” Lind says. “There’s a lot of excitement now around here. It’s special. Here I am, 78 years old and might be going to a big bowl game!”

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In 25 seasons as a college head coach, Willie Fritz had never won less than four games in a single season. And then came 2021, a 2-win year that included a three-week evacuation from New Orleans because of a hurricane.

Coming off three consecutive bowl trips—the first such feat in school history—the Green Wave slipped.

“It was a punch in the face,” says Wes Fritz, Willie’s son and Tulane’s director of player personnel. “We were steady on the incline and then took a hit.”

However, many around the program attribute this year’s success to last year’s adversity: Four losses by a touchdown or less and 22 nights in a Birmingham hotel while the city recovered from the impacts of Hurricane Ida.

Days before a much-ballyhooed home season opener against Oklahoma, Ida rolled ashore, flooded homes and knocked out power in the city for weeks. The entire Tulane athletic department relocated to the downtown Birmingham Sheraton, and the game against Oklahoma was moved to Norman.

More than 200 people from most of the program’s 16 sports—administrators, players, coaches, support staff—lived together in the hotel, along with their pets: at least 30 dogs, eight cats, four rats, two guinea pigs, a tarantula and one snake.

Staff and players grew close. They had no other choice.

“We understand each other outside of football now,” linebacker Nick Anderson says. “Everybody is playing for each other and playing together.”

Anderson dealt with more adversity than most last year. On his second day in Birmingham, his younger sister was involved in a serious car accident back home in his native Mississippi. She needed major surgery to insert a plate in her skull. And then, two weeks later, he broke his leg in a loss at Ole Miss.

While sequestered in Birmingham, Anderson and players didn’t have their vehicles, relegating them to eat at a handful of restaurants within walking distance in downtown Birmingham (thank goodness, Anderson says, for the nearby Subway). At the team hotel, no girlfriends were allowed, neither was alcohol, and there was a clothing issue, too.

“They told us to pack for three days,” says quarterback Michael Pratt. “It was a crappy situation. But you have two options: Let it carry over or bounce back.”

There was no doubt from the head man. Fritz, 62, is a journeyman coach who spent the first 17 years of his career outside of FBS.

“We had three years there where we almost turned the corner. But we lost a lot of close games,” he says. “I got a plan I believe in. I’ve done this a long time.”

This year’s team is virtually the same as last season—just older. In fact, Tulane has two sixth-year players and another four fifth-year guys. About 18 of the 22 starters are returnees. Since being around his dad’s teams for 15 years, Wes Fritz says this is the best one from a culture and leadership standpoint. “Good things happen when your players are your best leaders,” he says.

The Green Wave are riding high heading into one of their toughest tests of the season.   :: Tyler Kaufman/AP

However, not everything remained the same from 2021. The Green Wave hired a new offensive coordinator and strength coach. Jim Svoboda, the former head coach at Central Missouri, replaced Chip Long as OC and Kurt Hester, a Tulane alum who was Louisiana Tech, replaced Kyle Speer.

The Green Wave’s offense revolves around running back Tyjae Spears, who is averaging 5.6 yards a carry and has scored 10 touchdowns. But the team’s strength is a defense that ranks 11th in scoring and 16th in total yards allowed. Led by coordinator Chris Hampton and linebacker Dorian Williams (four sacks and a team-high 72 tackles), the unit has held five of nine opponents to 13 points or less, including Kansas State (10).

“Last year, everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Anderson says. “We talked about forgetting it.”

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When Dannen arrived at Tulane in December of 2015, the football program was in a state of disrepair. In the previous 13 years, the Green Wave had one winning season and three coaches.

The buzz around the university was oh-so familiar: Do they really care about sports?

“It was broken. When I got here, people questioned the commitment of the institution,” says Dannen, an Iowan who had been AD at Northern Iowa. “That’s not the case any longer.”

The school spent millions on the Birmingham evacuation plan after spending millions on COVID-19 testing in 2020. Fritz, courted two years ago for the job at Kansas, makes about $2.2 million a year on a contract that runs through the 2026 season. Incentives this year could get him to nearly $3 million, putting him within the top five of Group of 5 coaches with the departure to the Big 12 of Cincinnati, Houston and UCF.

Tulane’s athletic budget has grown substantially to around $50 million, on par with the three AAC teams heading to the Big 12. From an external point of view, the university brought back several classic logos used decades ago, most notably the Angry Wave.

“They’ve marketed the school really well,” says AAC commissioner Mike Aresco. “Tulane is a special place, and the president there, Michael Fitts, understands the value of athletics. This didn’t happen overnight. You have to go back to 1998 for a season like this. It’s a great story.”

The 1998 version of the Tulane Green Wave went undefeated with Tommy Bowden as head coach, Rich Rodriguez as offensive coordinator and Shaun King at quarterback. There are vibes here of ’98, except this team already has beaten more quality competition. That team 24 years ago did not beat a single team in the regular season that finished with a winning record.

“I hate it when people say there is no tradition here,” says Willie Fritz. “There’s a great tradition here. It just hasn’t happened consistently.”

Fritz’s fourth bowl in five years is quite the accomplishment. The Green Wave played in four bowls from 1987 to 2017.

It’s no easy place to win. The university is particular in who it admits. Tulane receives about 48,000 applications each year. Roughly 1,800 are admitted. There is some wiggle room with athletics, but not much (bare minimum for admittance is an 18 on the ACT and a 2.5 high school GPA).

In this era of player movement, transferring athletes present a real hurdle. Anyone admitted would have had to qualify out of high school and a large portion of their classes must transfer over. That eliminates many junior college players, says Fritz, who for years has recruited that level.

“I get calls from junior college coaches all of the time. ‘Hey! I got a player for you,’” says Fritz, “and I’ve got to tell them, ‘I can’t take ’em!’”

There are positives of being at such an academic institution, says Shane Meyer, director of football operations who played for Fritz at Central Missouri. For one, the Tulane staff sells the value of a scholarship. Tuition at Tulane is about $61,000, one of the most expensive in all of FBS. That’s part of why the school doesn’t lose as many players to the transfer portal as others in the Group of 5, even in this era of name, image and likeness (NIL).

Just one significant player, defensive lineman Jeffery Johnson, transferred this offseason. He landed at Oklahoma.

“Could you go somewhere else and get more … stuff? Yes,” says Meyer. “Could you go to a place with an indoor facility and a 75,000-seat stadium where your locker turns into a bed? Sure. But kids look around and know that a Tulane degree means something. And so do their parents.”

The high standards often produces a team that is mature, smart and disciplined.

“The worst problem we have is a kid being five minutes late for a meeting because he overslept,” laughs Meyer.

It wasn’t always this way. Dannen hired Fritz as one of his first moves, and the two men, neither with a background working at academic institutions, dove into the issues.

“We brought the athletic culture to go with the academic culture,” says Dannen. “Just like the SEC thinks you have to hire from the SEC, academics often think you have to hire from academics. You don’t.”

There’s much to celebrate for the Green Wave this season after an abysmal 2021 :: Tyler Kaufman/AP

Fritz took over a team of 90 total players with 75 of them on scholarship, 10 short of the NCAA standard. The walk-on program was almost non-existent, so he held tryouts during his first spring. About 10 people showed up, most of them who hadn’t played football in years.

“One guy pulled a hamstring while sprinting downfield,” recalls a chuckling Meyer.

Nowadays, the roster is at about 120. All of it has helped the Green Wave win 30 games in five years. That’s more victories in such a span since the 1997 to ’01 teams won 31. You have to go back to the 1970s to find a similar five-year run at the school.

With the victories have come the fans. In fact, a group of former players have started an NIL collective and raised more than $200,000.

Fan support is a lingering issue here. The alumni base isn’t local. At least one-fifth of Tulane graduates are from out of state, many of them from population centers such as New York, Atlanta and Miami.

“In some ways, we have to market this like minor league baseball. We have to be an entertainment option,” Dannen says.

Ticket prices are affordable and so are concessions. The school plays to its audience here in south Louisiana. A beer inside the stadium costs less than a bottle of water.

“What other place has $10 tickets for a top-25 game?” Dannen asks.

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Nearly every day, Angus Lind drives past Tulane’s stadium.

Now known as Yulman Stadium, it is much different than the one he walked into with his father some 73 years ago to see the last top-25 matchup that the school hosted. Back then, Tulane Stadium had a capacity of 80,000 and hosted the annual Sugar Bowl game. It was demolished in 1980, and the team for 50 years played its games in the New Orleans Superdome, something many believe contributed to the program’s dip. The 30,000-seat on-campus Yulman Stadium opened in 2014.

No. 10 Tulane faced off against No. 13 LSU in this matchup in 1949 / Courtesy of Tulane University

LSU hasn’t visited the new confines. In fact, the two teams last played in 2009, when LSU won its 18th consecutive game in the series. The Tigers refuse to play a home-and-home series with the Green Wave, wanting instead to host the games at Tiger Stadium. The two programs have not reconciled the differences.

But there is a chance the two will meet in a bowl game this year. If Tulane wins the AAC and finishes with the highest ranking of G5 teams, the Green Wave is likely bound for the Cotton Bowl, where it could be paired with an SEC team such as LSU.

Some bowl projections this week pitted the teams together in Dallas.

“That’s dream stuff,” says Lind.

But Fritz’s team has a trio of tough games ahead. UCF, coached by former Auburn coach Gus Malzahn, is stacked with transfer talent. The opponent, SMU, scored 77 points last week, and the Wave ends the season at Cincinnati, which advanced to the CFP last year.

Maybe it’s better than the alternative.

Despite Tulane having more SEC football titles (three) than seven current members of the league, the Wave won six SEC games its last nine years in the conference.

“There are people still mad that we left the SEC. I still get emails,” says Dannen. “Do you want to be Vanderbilt and have Alabama come into your place and kick your butt every year?”

Tulane survived the SEC exit, which few thought possible. It survived two coups to end its football program, and it persevered through a pair of major hurricanes—Katrina and Ida—that tore through its campus.

The Wave just keeps on rolling along. And on Saturday, win or lose, it hosts a game on campus 73 years in the making.

Lind will be there, just like he was in 1949.

“It’s important for a university to have a football team,” says Bill Goldring, a longtime member on Tulane’s legislative board and a billionaire businessman from New Orleans whose family has been in the alcohol industry since 1898.

“The emotion of the people being at those games, just walking into those games … you see lines of people waiting to get in for kickoff. They can’t take the tickets fast enough. Kids need the opportunity to go to a game and experience what it’s like on a Saturday afternoon tailgating for Tulane football.

“That feeling is coming back now.”