Rice Is Now 1-9

The less written directly about Tulane's brutal 28-20 loss to Rice the better.

Still, the Green Wave must move on. It always a fine line about when you start looking toward next year- particularly with the allocation of playing time. In college football, you owe your seniors every shot to get to that sixth win. Well, now that is past- and frankly, we need to see a whole lot less of Andre Anderson.

He had one big run yesterday- and took him 26 tries to get it- which I think we can all agree is not a good enough ratio of big play to snap ratio for this crazy League. The rest of his day was barely pedestrian: 25-94. If you want to know how Tulane turned 400 yards of offense into 20 points- well, you might look at the snaps wasted at three yards a pop here.

Maybe it is the offensive line, whatever. And I like Andre- he was darn good last year- and I doubt he forgot how to play. Maybe he is hurt, maybe it is the rotating quarterbacks… But Andre is not justifying his workload right now. So try something, someone else. The stauts quo is bad- but the new might either bring some improvement (admittedly doubtful) or groom next year’s option(s). Let's see some of these TB recruits Coach Toledo and those camp observers were in love with not three months ago.

I want to see the new tailbacks next Saturday in sustained action- particularly since all Tulane skill positions are going to be devastated at graduation. We have two games of developmental snaps left- and a whole lot of those snaps need to be devoted to letting the candidates for next year see the elephant.

Next, and I cribbed this from some poster on yogwf,(ed note: the poster was QuarterbackU) with practice time at such a premium in I-A, does Tulane have time to practice a double-reverse on a kick return- and not on getting punts and extra points performed competently?

In fact, I’ve had it with all the gimmick plays. I don’t have any numbers- but does this nonsense ever work? Have we had any bolt of lightening plays to justify the time and effort we put in, both in practice and and on game days, to substantiate this tactic. I hate it; please stop. Tulane is a bad team- so they need to do all the little things right. Rice largely beat Tulane not because they had more talent or resources or better game plan- but because they could run the requisite kicking plays semi-orderly.

Maybe we could use the freed up practice time on the two minute drill? Last two possessions: eight plays, zero yards, twice ball turned over on downs. Against Rice?