Strong Tulane Green Wave Transfer Portal Class Distorted by Flawed Rankings
The Tulane Green Wave was hit notably hard by the transfer portal after the 2024 college football season.
While the losses for Tulane football will be obvious on the field when spring practice kicks off in two weeks, so will the important presence of head coach Jon Sumrall.
The portal is an imperfect system of frenzied movement, particularly as NIL has transformed the college sports landscape. One of the hardest Group of Five programs hit by those effects was the Green Wave.
However, the ranking system that dictates the perception of portal classes doesn’t fully encompass the intricacies of each team, player, and coach.
It’s also biased towards more well-known Power Four conferences and weights those players higher—and conversely downgrades transfers to the G5.
247 Sports, On3, and Rivals all offer ratings for prospects out of high school and the portal.
There’s never going to be a perfect star-based system, and they’re all valuable tools for assessing movement with the information available to those not on college football coaching staffs.
But they can acutely distort the efforts of coaches and the true competitiveness of rosters. Examining some of these trends for Tulane through 247 Sports provides more of a starting point than a definitive answer.
It was hard to gauge the portal class under Sumrall’s first year as head coach, and a lot of the players were brought over from the Troy Trojans.
The team lost a lot of starters, but they were mainly seniors who declared for the NFL draft. This season, portal entrants made up the majority of the departures.
Quarterback-turned-tight end Ty Thompson is a solid example of why star ratings only go so far. Thompson was a four-star prospect with a 95 rating. His transfer downgraded his rating by a star to 85.
That hasn’t been updated since he lost out in the quarterback competition to Darian Mensah and switched positions.
Mensah was aided by a portal bump to his three-star, 82 rating as a prospect. The Duke Blue Devil is a four-star transfer with a 90 rating. Running back Makhi Hughes received the same re-rate upon transferring to the Oregon Ducks from 84 out of high school.
After their departures, Alex Bauman and Parker Petersen followed the same pattern.
It does speak to the value Mensah, Hughes, Bauman, and Petersen created for themselves and the lucrative NIL deals they received for their efforts.
However, the conversation about the football team's competitiveness last offseason didn't even include Mensah.
Last spring, Petersen transitioned from a backup edge rusher to a starting nose tackle.
Thompson and Mario Williams dictated the conversation about incoming transfers. It did bring an elite feeling to the program with multiple high-ranking prospects choosing Tulane as their next destination.
Williams is a great example of the system working and a player being perhaps better than advertised with an impressive toughness that closed the season out.
Upon joining the Green Wave, his rating dropped from 94 to 90. There’s not a discernible justification as to why.
In contrast, wide receiver Khai Prean brought a level of pedigree from the LSU Tigers and was a 90-rated high school prospect.
His rating was never updated after transferring from the Tigers to Tulane, and he currently sits in the portal with no destination after playing negligible snaps.
Sometimes, landing spots don't yield the desired results. But Prean, as a four-star player, brings down the ratings for a program that wasn’t impacted by his efforts much at all.
What players on the field do ultimately matter and are a landmark of Sumrall as a coach as he enters his second season in New Orleans.
His decision-making produced Mensah and a football team that contended for the American Athletic Conference title.
That should be the focus of their upcoming spring camp more than the numerical analysis of star ratings lost in the transfer portal cycle.
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Maddy Hudak is the deputy editor for Tulane on Sports Illustrated and the radio sideline reporter for their football team. Maddy is an alumnus of Tulane University, and graduated in 2016 with a degree in psychology. She went on to obtain a Master of Legal Studies while working as a research coordinator at the VA Hospital, and in jury consulting. During this time, Maddy began covering the New Orleans Saints with SB Nation, and USA Today. She moved to New Orleans in 2021 to pursue a career in sports and became Tulane's sideline reporter that season. She enters her fourth year with the team now covering the program on Sports Illustrated, and will use insights from features and interviews in the live radio broadcast. You can follow her on X at @MaddyHudak_94, or if you have any questions or comments, she can be reached via email at maddy.hudak1@gmail.com