Personal Foul Tulane is How We Roll To Victory

Well, SMU came through late and got Frank Helps You Think It All Out a backdoor cover- squaring are season mark.

It was nice to showcase C-USA in all its shoot-out glory last night: defenses taking entire halves off, curious officiating, the commitment to score, score, score some more. “Personal Foul Tulane is How We Roll” got a workout too; please remember I own the t-shirt rights.

So, what do we have? Again, I know I am prone to overanalyze the Green Wave- one of the greatest psychiatric experiment going in college football. For example, Tulane plays an increasingly life-or-death struggle against one of the worst five teams in the country in their own building, committed a bunch of ill-disciplined penalties, a few turnovers, shaky special teams play- and an entire second half that would get them beat by two-three scores versus a top C-USA team. Everyone watching was praying that Jones would eschew the on-side kick late- knowing our Toledo-style special teams were almost guaranteed to fail in that spot.

Yet, the large consensus of fans think Tulane played pretty well. Who am I to disagree? C-USA is a weird League.

Shoot, Anderson did his job- generating a cartoon number- as did the entire offense in the first half. I hesitate to put the defense in the plus bucket- as SMU was a joke in the first half- and frankly, we’ve seen the defense play better in each of the first three games. And in the second half, the defense looked bored and played pretty dumb for long stretches. But if I give’em a pass in the first half, I’m inclined to give a pass for the second half too. I mean, gosh, defending SMU in that first half almost had to produce a horrid ennui.

I dunno. The Green Wave has a pair of home wins against two teams in the bottom ten or so outfits in college football. This surely validates Tulane isn’t in the worst ten teams in college football, but little else. Pre-season, my fair over/under was 3.5- pride makes me loathe to move off it in light of inconclusive evidence.

But I probably should. Frankly, the best argument for moving it to five or so is that Tulane figures to face many, many more denizens of the utter bottom- they could play five, six games against the worst fifteen teams in football.

And again, since there is now evidence they are better than that "level", you could move the Green Wave up.