Olive and Blues: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

OLIVE AND BLUES

On the first play of Saturday’s season opener against Duke, Tulane’s Bandit edge Jah'rie Garner beat the Blue Devil  right tackle and End Josh Lewis beat the left tackle.  They met at the quarterback, leading to a pressured tipped ball that fell incomplete.  It was reminiscent of the opening play of last year’s opener against Northwestern, when Harvey Dyson beat his man for a quarterback sack and forced fumble. 

The similarities between the two games ended with that play if you’re a Tulane fan, unless you want to equate us Saturday to Northwestern a year ago.  You’d have a strong case. 

About two weeks ago I asked Coach Hall what kept him up at night as we approached kickoff.  He thought for a second and then replied “the early schedule, and the fact that we are talented but young and also short on experience on both lines. We’ll get better as the season goes on but early on it will be a test.”

If this game was a test, it felt like the kind you occasionally have a dream about, where you’re back in school and it’s the day of final exams and you realize that you forgot to attend any classes during the semester.  Only with this game Saturday, you didn’t get to wake up and realize it was just a dream.

When I was a freshman at Tulane I was enrolled in an English class and had to write an essay on some long forgotten book.  The professor gave me an “I” grade.  I went up to him after class to ask what that meant, and he said “it means incomplete.  I do that because I don’t give out ‘F’ grades.  Re-write it.”  I did, and got a D-minus.  I got a C-minus on the next one, a C+ on the next one, a B on the next one, and an A on the final.  I figured I would end up with a C, but the guy gave me an A for the semester.  “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” he said.

It doesn’t usually work that way in college football, where they all count.  College football is more like the classroom of my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. McCauley.  If you failed a test in her class, you got to sit in what she called “the F row” which was reserved for the worst performing students in her class.  She would announce to the rest of the class, daily, how ashamed these students should feel about their despicable performance.

Because fifth graders don’t always respond well to that kind of pedagogical motivation, most of the students who got sentenced to the “F Row” accepted their fate and stayed there all year.

Coach Will Hall has been consigned by many to the F Row and subject to Mrs. McCauley-like motivational techniques since the day he was hired, and Saturday was his chance to change seats.  Instead, he gets another week.

There’s not much to analyze here.  We were whipped up front by what appeared to be a faster, more physical, more hungry football team. Both teams tried to run their ground-heavy attacks (“I just want to see a forward pass; I feel like I’m watching 1933 Georgia Tech or something” from someone in our group chat was perhaps a tad exaggerated….perhaps).  Only one team ran the ball successfully.  Defensively we weren’t always gap-sound, we didn’t get off blocks as well as we could have, and we didn’t tackle their stud tailback very well.  I never thought I’d say this in 2026, but their linebackers outplayed ours. More intensity, more physicality. 

Offensively our O-line struggled to control the line of scrimmage, our tackles struggled when we were forced to throw, and our attempts to be creative moving our linemen in space and getting the ball on the perimeter didn’t work against an opponent whose pursuit got there before our blockers could.

Yes, we were missing our center, and yes we were down a guard, and yes we had a tackle playing hurt, but we still looked tentative and a step slow, and Duke exploited that as they should have.  They played the game downhill on their toes, and we played it uphill on our heels.  We had 15 penalties which is inexcusable, but a number of them were forced by the way Duke attacked our front repeatedly.

And now we have a quarterback ‘controversy,’ if you want to call it that, after one game.  No comment on this at the moment, except to acknowledge that when your correspondent’s preseason analysis of the position involved a combination of candle-lighting and prayer, astute readers probably figured we might have issues.  I expect the line play to get better moving forward as they get healthier and more cohesive.  It can’t get much worse than it was Saturday.  With the quarterbacks, we’ll see.  I said before the season I thought we’d see two and maybe three playing.  It’s up to this coaching staff to clean up a whole lot this week, but getting the quarterback plan and the confidence in the quarterback room stabilized has to be high on the list.  In their defense, it’s hard at any level to play the position when you’re getting rocked at the back of your drop on a three-man rush.

The standard advice after a game like this is “flush it” or “burn the tape.”  Coach Sumrall used to like to say that when you win, everyone is patting you on the back and telling you how great you are; when you lose, the same people are telling you that you suck and want you fired.

Something else he always said was that when something bad happens, we say ‘good.’   You have to GO through it to GROW from it.  “Attitude is everything,” Coach Hall says.

Well, something bad happened.  And the fascinating thing about this coming week is that not everyone is capable of having that attitude.  When adversity hits, especially this kind of fishbowl adversity which many a coach and team across time have experienced, not all handle it well.  Some will unravel, splinter apart from each other, form cliques, lose their belief and conviction.  It happened to many Tulane teams in my youth, and it even happens in professional sports. 

This is a gut check  moment for our players and coaches.   For the players it tests their love for each other, the shared culture they’ve built, their belief in their coaches, and their respect for the work they’ve put into this.  For the coaches it tests all the same things, plus their ability to fix everything that went wrong Saturday and to convince the players that they’ve fixed it. 

The difference is that these players are young, and a lot of them have little or no experience with losing against what should have been a comparable opponent in such a dispiriting way.  The ones here last year remember the UTSA game and how we responded to that, so they can help teach the new players how to handle it.  Our head coach, in contrast, does have more extensive experience at his last stop of being seated and berated in the “F Row.”  There are scars that come with that, whether you’re a fifth grader or an adult, and when it happens again a man is more prone to spiraling thoughts that can take him to uncomfortable places.  It takes a special kind of faith, self-belief and iron will to get back to work Monday and restore the group confidence that we can do this, together.  Tulane fans of a certain age, with decades spent in the F Row as fans, understand the kind of mountain that needs to be climbed this week. They understand the way the human mind works, the “oh no, here we go again” mentality that has so many of our fans predicting continued disaster starting next week.  On the road of life, getting from here to wallowing is always a shorter journey than getting from here to winning.

I thought Coach said all the right things after the game and made no excuses.  He saw what we saw.  But there’s only one way to get off the F Row, and it’s not slogans and mantras and talk.  It’s an honest assessment of who we are, what we did wrong, the steps needed to make it right, and the willingness to work harder than he’s ever worked before.  Then he has to transmit all of that to his staff and all his players and get them to buy in and rebuild what got damaged in Durham.

And he has less than a week to do it.  Welcome to college football, where the faint of heart and the weak of belief need not apply.  In the words of the old Scottish sailor,

“I am hurt but I am not slain,

I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile,

Then I’ll rise to fight again.”