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TicketsSports · USUNC Charlotte 49ers Football vs. Tulane Green Wave FootballJerry Richardson Stadium · CharlotteTicketsSports · USTulane Green Wave Football vs. North Texas Mean Green FootballYulman Stadium · New OrleansTicketsSports · USSouth Florida Bulls Football vs. Tulane University FootballRaymond James Stadium · TampaThe profile · researched 16 September 2026
A playoff berth, a coach out the door, and a rebuild that started in week one
Tulane won the American Conference in December 2025 and reached the College Football Playoff for the first time, then lost its head coach to Florida before the run had finished. Will Hall's first season is an attempt to hold that height with a largely rebuilt squad.
Old money, long odds
Tulane has fielded a football team since 1893, which makes it older than most of the programmes that now dwarf it. The Green Wave have won eleven conference championships across five different leagues, three of them in the Southeastern Conference — in 1934, 1939 and 1949 — a total that still exceeds what nine of the SEC's present members have managed. The 1931 side reached the Rose Bowl as a national finalist, and the programme's first bowl win came in the inaugural Sugar Bowl in 1935, played in its own stadium in New Orleans.
What followed was decades of being the small private school in a region that industrialised its football. The all-time record sits at 584-679-38, a winning percentage of.463, with a bowl record of 7-10. The rivalry with LSU, the Battle for the Rag, reads 69-23-7 in LSU's favour. The Battle for the Bell against Southern Miss is 24-10 to the Eagles.
The modern reference points are narrower and sharper: an undefeated 12-0 regular season in 1998, and the 2022 team that beat USC 46-45 in the Cotton Bowl Classic, a result that put Tulane back in the national conversation for the first time in a generation.
Back on campus
The structural change underneath the recent success was a building. Yulman Stadium opened in 2014 with a capacity of 30,000, deliberately low-profile so as not to loom over the residential streets around Tulane's Uptown campus. It ended decades of playing home games off campus in a cavernous professional stadium where a decent crowd still looked like an empty room.
The venue is modest by the standards of the sport and better for it. The Glazer Family Club holds roughly 1,500 chairback seats over the 50-yard line; the Westfeldt Terrace adds about 3,000 covered seats with a view of the downtown skyline. The green-and-white checkerboard end zones, an old tradition, were brought back.
Average home attendance in 2025 was 24,068, 89th among the 130-odd FBS programmes. That number is the honest frame for everything that follows: Tulane has been competing with, and beating, schools that draw three times as many people.
2025: a title, a playoff, and a coach already gone
The 2025 season was the best the programme has had in the playoff era. Under Jon Sumrall, in his second year, Tulane went 11-3 overall and 7-1 in the American Conference, beating Northwestern 23-3, South Alabama 33-31 and Duke 34-27 in non-conference play. The one heavy defeat came at Ole Miss, 45-10, in September.
On 5 December the Green Wave hosted North Texas in the American Conference Championship Game and won 34-21, a second league crown in four years. Jake Retzlaff scored two short rushing touchdowns and Jamauri McClure ran for 121 yards and a score. The win secured the first College Football Playoff berth in Tulane history.
It was a strange fortnight. Florida had hired Sumrall on 30 November, and he split his time between the two jobs while committing to finish the Tulane season — the conference final and whatever the playoff brought. What it brought was Ole Miss again, on 20 December at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, and a second flattening: 41-10. The Rebels scored on two of their first three possessions and never trailed. Tulane finished ranked 18th in both the AP and coaches' polls. Sumrall left with a 20-8 record and a conference championship game appearance in each of his two seasons.
Will Hall, hired from down the corridor
Tulane announced Will Hall as its replacement on 8 December 2025 and introduced him the following day as the 42nd head coach in the programme's history. He did not have far to travel: he had rejoined the staff earlier that year as passing game coordinator and wide receivers coach, a unit that improved visibly over the second half of the season.
Hall had been Tulane's offensive coordinator in 2019 and 2020, the stint in which he took a freshman quarterback named Michael Pratt and turned him into the most productive passer the school has had in decades. Between the two Tulane spells he was head coach at Southern Miss, where he went 14-30 across four seasons — one 7-6 year that ended in a bowl win, and not much else — before being dismissed in 2024. Before that he won at Division II level at West Alabama and West Georgia.
He assembled a staff of Russ Callaway as offensive coordinator, Tayler Polk as defensive coordinator and Nate Fuqua as co-defensive coordinator. The roster he inherited had no Retzlaff, who was out of eligibility, and the usual modern churn beneath that.
Two games into the new thing
The Hall era opened badly. On 5 September 2026 Tulane travelled to Durham and lost 17-3 to Duke, the defending ACC champion. The Green Wave did not score a touchdown — the first time that had happened since a 24-6 defeat at Auburn in September 2019 — and their only points came from a 37-yard Jackson Courville field goal with 13:37 left. Duke's Nate Sheppard ran for 227 yards and two scores. Hall took the blame publicly, pointing at penalties, dropped passes and players who had looked better all pre-season than they did that night.
A week later, on 12 September, the home opener against South Alabama at Yulman went the other way, 28-24, in Mardi Gras uniforms. South Alabama led 10-0 after a P.J. Martin touchdown; Johnnie Daniels ran in two scores to put Tulane 14-10 up at the interval; South Alabama went back in front 17-14 in the third on a receiving touchdown by Anthony Eager. The lead changed hands on each of the last five touchdowns. Kadin Semonza, making his first career start, threw for 212 yards and found Destyn Hill — a New Orleans product out of Edna Karr — from 14 yards with 1:17 remaining for the winner. Jaylin Lucas, a transfer from Florida State, ran 11 times for 214 yards, an average of 19.5 a carry that set an American Conference record.
Tulane sit 1-1 with the conference schedule still ahead. Kansas State away on 19 September at noon on ESPN2 closes the tough part of the opening month. Southern Miss visit on 26 September as the programme's Hall of Fame game, the first Battle for the Bell since 2023, when Tulane won 21-3 in Hattiesburg. Memphis come to Yulman on 16 October in the Thursday-night ESPN window. North Texas arrive on 21 November for a rematch of the championship game, and the regular season ends at South Florida on 27 November.
The show, now
A Tulane home date runs about three and a half hours of football wrapped in most of a day on campus. Tailgate Village opens on the Newcomb and Berger Family Lawn, between Freret and Willow streets, four hours before weekend kickoffs and two and a half before weeknight ones, with jazz bands playing sets, the cheer squad running warm-up chants and undergraduate tailgating on Brown Field a short walk from the gates. The marching band warms up behind Newcomb Hall and then parades through both tailgating quads and down McAlister Drive to the stadium, led by cheerleaders throwing beads from a float built by the Kerns of Mardi Gras World, with the crowd falling in behind. Inside, after a video-board introduction, the band takes the field to a drum cadence and opens with a fanfare built on Rebirth Brass Band's "Let's Go Get 'Em", then "Roll On, Tulane", then "When the Saints Go Marching In". Concessions are local rather than generic: po'boys, red beans and sausage, crawfish nachos, muffulettas, fried chicken in pepper butter sauce, with beer and wine sold throughout. Seating runs from general admission and party decks up to the Glazer Family Club's chairbacks at midfield and the covered Westfeldt Terrace with its downtown view. Reviewers rate the pre-game as comparable to far larger programmes and the stadium itself as intimate rather than imposing — 30,000 capacity against a 2025 average of 24,068, which means a full house is loud and a flat one is obvious. The 12 September win over South Alabama, decided with 1:17 left after five lead changes, was the kind of night the place is built for. Six home dates remain on the 2026 card: South Alabama and Southern Miss in September, Memphis and UTSA in October, Tulsa and the North Texas title-game rematch in November.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · tulanehullabaloo.com · fox8live.com · abcnews.com · espn.com · cbssports.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Bobster687 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Photographer not credited · Public domain
Vegasjon · CC BY-SA 4.0
