Shaun King never got his chance.
In 1998, Tulane went 12-0 with King at quarterback, a historic season with Tommy Bowden as the head coach and Rich Rodriguez as the offensive coordinator. But the Green Wave, ranked No. 10 in the first year of the Bowl Championship Series as Conference USA champions, were sent to the Liberty Bowl against unranked BYU. The Green Wave didn’t get a BCS game against a top-10 team or a shot at a national championship against a top-10 opponent. King, who spent eight years in the NFL, believes they would have had a chance.
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“I don’t think there’s much separation between an elite non-Power 5 team and a Power 5 team,” he said. “We’re talking one game.”
With Bowden, Rodriguez and King gone the next year, Tulane dropped to 3-8, and the program has faced 24 difficult years since. From 1999 to 2021, Tulane had five winning seasons, only one with more than eight wins.
Until this year, that is. Rebounding from a 2-10 season a year ago, Tulane is 11-2 and the AAC champion. The Green Wave finally will get their marquee game, a Cotton Bowl matchup with USC and Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams on Monday. It’s Tulane’s first major bowl game since the 1939 season when it played in the Sugar Bowl as the SEC co-champion.
Yes, Tulane was once an SEC team, and it wasn’t kicked out. To this day, it still has more SEC football championships than Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Arkansas, South Carolina, Missouri or Texas A&M and the same amount as Mississippi State. The school voluntarily left the conference in 1965, after a period of believing the business of college sports had overtaken the academic mission of universities (imagine what the school thinks now). It also had a desire to attract students across the country with a lighter and national schedule. The program wandered the wilderness for the ensuing decades.
The 1998 team was the high point. King wasn’t surprised by that season after Tulane won seven games the year before. But the 2022 team? He didn’t see this one coming. Who would have? It’s only the sixth time ever a team has improved from double-digit losses to double-digit wins.
Senior linebacker Nick Anderson saw it coming. One year ago on New Year’s Eve, Anderson watched the Alabama–Cincinnati Cotton Bowl semifinal game with his sisters and teammate Larry Brooks. His sisters wanted to hit some parties in Atlanta, but Anderson couldn’t be taken away from watching that game. His sisters didn’t understand it. Tulane had gone 2-10 but played Cincinnati close that season.
Anderson turned to Brooks and said, “That’s going to be us next year.”
It has taken 83 long years to get back.
Tulane was one of the best teams of the 1920s. The Green Wave won four Southern Conference titles from 1925 to 1931, reaching the Rose Bowl in the 1931 season. Louisiana loved college football, and there wasn’t an NFL team in the state until the Saints arrived in 1967. Why does LSU famously play night games? It started because Tulane football was so popular in New Orleans, night games would allow time for fans to get to Baton Rouge afterward.
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The 1948 team went 9-1, and the 1949 team lost to LSU in the finale with the Sugar Bowl on the line. But the downfall soon followed. President Rufus Harus, who didn’t like the trajectory of the SEC’s emphasis on athletics, cut Tulane’s football scholarships from around 100 to 75, cut coaching salaries and recruiting budgets and limited offseason workouts and travel teams. Shortly after, in March 1952, head coach Henry Frnka resigned to work in a non-athletics job at a small school in Texas. From 1952 to 1965, Tulane went 37-95-8. The Green Wave didn’t win more than one SEC game in a season from 1957 to 1965.
On Dec. 31, 1964, president Herbert E. Longenecker announced Tulane would leave the SEC in 1966, saying it wanted to instead play a national schedule as a high-academic independent school looking to recruit nationally and also lighten its schedule. This was different from Sewanee’s departure from the SEC in 1940 with no success but similar to Georgia Tech’s departure in 1964 about scholarships. Longenecker said Tulane’s decision wasn’t about a de-emphasis of athletics. That was only technically true, as the de-emphasis already happened.
Talks of a “Southern Ivy League” with Duke, Vanderbilt and others never came together, success as an independent came sparingly, and things got worse. The school was a single vote away from disbanding the program in 1985 after a point-shaving scandal with the men’s basketball team, which actually did shut down for five years. Mack Brown went 1-10 in his first season as Tulane’s head coach that year, while also serving as impromptu athletic director. He went 6-6 in his third season but left for North Carolina.
The 1998 season was magical, but even after an 8-5 season in 2002, the school’s board of trustees held a discussion and vote about possibly dropping to a lower level of football. (The board voted 27-0 to remain Division I-A). The 2005 team played every game away from home after Hurricane Katrina damaged the Superdome.
A fortuitous break finally came in the form of conference realignment. In 2014, Tulane joined a large group of schools jumping from Conference USA to the new American Athletic Conference, which was a restructured version of the old Big East.
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“When we took them, there was controversy,” AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said. “People said, ‘Why are you taking them?’ They hadn’t had a lot of success and had talked of downgrading the program, but we were confident they had moved beyond that.”
Aresco and the AAC saw investment and opportunity in a talent-rich location. Yulman Stadium opened on campus in 2014. But after consecutive 3-9 seasons, Tulane made another coaching change.
“The program was so far down,” athletic director Troy Dannen said. “It had a lot of steps to climb.”
Dannen knew what he wanted in a coach. He didn’t know how transformative it would be.
Willie Fritz never has been flashy, but he always has won.
A former Division II player at Pittsburg State, the Kansas native spent the first nine years of his career as a student assistant, high school coach or junior college coach, far from any radar. But he was sharp. At 33 years old, he became the head coach at Blinn College in 1993, taking over a junior college team that had five wins in the previous three years. Fritz went 39-5-1 with two JUCO national championships.
He moved to Division II Central Missouri in 1997, took the school to the postseason for the first time in 32 years and won 97 games in 13 years. At FCS Sam Houston, he went 40-15 in four years and reached two national championship games. He finally reached the Football Bowl Subdivision at Georgia Southern, going 17-7 from 2014 to 2015.
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At Tulane, Dannen wanted someone with head coaching experience, and he didn’t want someone with a gimmick for scoring a lot of points or playing great defense. He just wanted a winner.
“Since 1998, Tulane had tried a lot of different characteristics in a coach,” he said. “The one thing Tulane had not done was hire someone who had been a consistent winner wherever he’d been.”
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Fritz’s run of success continued at Tulane, reaching three consecutive bowl games for the first time in program history from 2018 to 2020. Then another hurricane relocated the program. The Green Wave spent the first month of the 2021 season in Birmingham, Ala. A home game against Oklahoma became a road game. The team finished 2-10, and some wondered if Fritz had hit the ceiling of what could be done at Tulane in the modern era. He didn’t see it that way, and he saw momentum with the way the Green Wave handled the relocation and still finished the season strong, including that battle with Cincinnati.
“We faced a lot of adversity, and the guys conducted themselves in a first-class manner the whole time,” Fritz said. “That tells you about your culture.”
After handling the bumps of 2021, Tulane’s journey to this Cotton Bowl began last January. It’s a cliche that player-led workouts help a team, but it really happened with the Green Wave, and they happened all year. Every Powerpoint presentation in meetings ended with a photo of the AAC championship trophy. When defensive coordinator Chris Hampton returned to his office on a July afternoon to grab something, he saw upwards of 30 players out on the field working their own drills. Anderson, driven by watching Cincinnati in last year’s Cotton Bowl, led the charge.
“Me and the fellow captains had a meeting and said the standard was the best,” he said. “We didn’t want to come back and go .500. We wanted to win the conference and make a New Year’s Six Bowl.”
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The Green Wave started 3-0 with a win at Kansas State, a victory that wouldn’t fully be appreciated until K-State won the Big 12 months later. They lost to Southern Miss the next week but were nearly perfect the rest of the way. They beat Houston. They beat Memphis in front of the first Yulman Stadium sellout crowd since the first game in 2014. They lost to UCF but rebounded with 59 points against SMU in a win, then ended Cincinnati’s 32-game home winning streak. In a UCF rematch, Tulane got revenge and won the AAC title.
With an increased use of zone coverage, Tulane’s defense ranks in the top 25 nationally in points per game and yards per play allowed. Junior quarterback Michael Pratt, with his eighth offensive coordinator in seven years of playing football, ranks in the top 15 nationally in yards per pass and pass efficiency. The former three-star recruit with mostly Ivy League offers broke out in his third year as the starter. Running back Tyjae Spears was the AAC offensive player of the year.
It did not go unnoticed that Tulane beat all three AAC teams leaving for the Big 12 next year, plus the Big 12 champion. Pratt smiled when the topic came up.
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“A lot of really good milestones for us,” he said.
“Whenever they hang that banner,” King said, “no one can say they didn’t win the AAC at its toughest.”
It has been a year of ending streaks. The K-State win was Tulane’s first Power 5 win since joining the AAC. The Cincinnati win was Tulane’s first against a ranked team since 1984 and first in a ranked-vs-ranked game since 1956. It was the first time Tulane was ranked since that 1998 season. By making the Cotton Bowl — and with the expanded College Football Playoff coming — the decision to leave the SEC finally can be left in the past.
“I’ve never worried nor dealt with the SEC decision,” Dannen said. “There are people here who will never get over that, regardless of what happens. But there were a lot of things we haven’t done over the last 25 years that we now have done.”
The future remains bright for Tulane. Fritz decided to stay at Tulane after having deep discussions with Georgia Tech. Pratt, who had a lot of Power 5 transfer interest, announced he would stay with the Green Wave instead of leaving. Licensing revenue is expected to make a huge jump thanks to this season and the popularity of the Angry Wave logo that returned in 2016. Facility upgrades could be next. The Fear The Wave Collective has quadrupled since the AAC title win. This is the moment on which to capitalize.
At long last, Tulane has returned to the national stage of college football. This time, it doesn’t plan to leave.
“This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” Dannen said. “This is what we can be. Now how do we keep our place?”
(Top photo of Michael Pratt: Matthew Visinsky / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
