On Loss and Redemption: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

“Every time you lose you die a little bit.  You die inside…a portion of you.  Not all of your organs.  Maybe just your liver.”—George Allen

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”—Queen Elizabeth II

It was a warm evening in South Louisiana in June 2005, and I had just tuned in to ESPN.  In my wallet was an airline ticket to Omaha. Work obligations had prevented me from going out for our first two games in the College World Series.  We had won the first and dropped the second.  Yet we were the Number One seed in the double elimination tournament for a reason, and we had the depth and talent to recover and make a run.  We had been excellent in elimination games in both our conference tournament and in the Super Regionals, and many of us believed that once we took care of Baylor and sent them home we would be on our way. 

Longtime fans of our baseball program will know that I never got on that plane.  When the Baylor game ended it took me a while just to get off the couch, if I’m being honest.  We blew a 7-0 lead,  gave up three runs in the ninth and lost 8-7 on an errant throw that allowed the winning run to cross home plate.  I remember staring at the TV and wondering what in the heck just happened.  A couple of weeks later, Father William Maestri wrote a beautiful piece about that game for the Clarion Herald that I cut out of the paper and kept.  In the sad aftermath of our loss  to Memphis on Thanksgiving Night, I dug out that old relic  and re-read it.  “It was not supposed to be this way,” Father Maestri wrote.

No it wasn't, then or now.  Outside noise, the good kind, made Tulane's loss to Memphis on Thanksgiving Night especially hard to stomach.  Tulane fans understand that the Saints and LSU tend to suck all of the oxygen out of the room during football season.  But this year both of those programs have underperformed, and you can also throw in the injury-riddled Pelicans and their disastrous start.  It felt heading into this game that the city had one winner it could tie its banner to, and it seemed finally that people were taking notice.  It felt like in the past three years we had turned the corner from an occasional feel-good story to a real sustainable force on the college football scene.  The build-up and buzz for the game was palpable, and thousands of casual or curious area football fans showed up Thursday night to root on the home team.

The local interest and attention grew out of larger national interest and attention.  For a couple of weeks Tulane was climbing in the College Football Playoff poll, capped by the November 26 poll release when the Committee chair noted how impressed they were with the way we were playing.  One of the regulars on ESPN’s popular ‘GameDay’ segment last Saturday wore a Tulane sweatshirt.  We were trending.   Reputable national media started talking not only about Tulane’s chance to get into the Playoff, but its chance to leapfrog the Big 12 champion and land a bye in the playoff along with a home game in New Orleans.   It was a heady couple of weeks.   The stage was set. About 400 miles upriver, Memphis witnessed this lovefest from an entirely different vantage point.  They were a consensus preseason CFP favorite, with a talented veteran roster.  But they had lost two league games and blown that opportunity.  Nobody was talking about them.   They toiled in obscurity during their bye week as an experienced and capable 9-2 football team looking to avenge last year’s loss to us that derailed their season, a team tired of hearing about our regular season conference winning streak and our odds to make the Playoff and how physical we were.  If they needed any more motivation, they got it from oddsmakers who installed Tulane as a two-touchdown favorite. 

They showed up and played their best game of the year, and we didn't match their execution and focus.  Simple as that.  But the sense of loss and sadness lingered.  We had everything in front of us, right there, and we couldn't close the deal.  We had dropped the ball literally and figuratively.

A result like the one Thanksgiving Night predictably splits fans into two camps, and not just at Tulane University.  The first camp is comprised of those who channel their heartbreak into frustration and anger.  “The same people who are patting you on the back and telling you how great you are, are the same people who dog cuss you if you lose,” as Jon Sumrall said two weeks ago.  Sure enough, there were dog-cusses heard late on Thanksgiving night.  Sumrall was outcoached, they said.  He fattens up on cupcake opponents but he can’t beat good teams.   Our schemes only work against inferior opponents.  Our athletes are too small or too slow or not good enough.  We choked.  We were unprepared.  And so it goes.  

In the second camp are the protectors.  They channel their heartbreak into defending the program and scolding the attackers.  Look how far this program has come, they say.  We haven’t been in three consecutive conference championship games in almost a hundred years.  We have changed the culture at the university and built something nobody thought was possible—a ‘football school’ on Willow Street helmed by a rising star who is one of the most coveted coaches in all of college football.  Be grateful for where we are.  And so on.

Our football staff instinctively understands that in life and in football, it is essential that these competing tensions be welcomed and synthesized if progress is going to be made.  On the one hand, high standards and high expectations must be normalized.  Week after week, even as the wins piled up, our head coach stressed the need to continue to prepare properly, learn and get better.  He warned that if we didn’t do those things consistently and at a high level, week after week, we were going to get exposed.  Even after 30+ point wins, he repeatedly expressed frustration and anger at various in-game failures on both sides of the ball. 

On the other hand, enduring commitment and belief are also essential.  Coach Sumrall openly admired the way his players had embraced each other and committed themselves to their joint mission. “I’m in awe of the men in this room,” as he said in Annapolis.  He fully believed in the strength and capacity of his football team and what it could accomplish, against any opponent.  

His comments after the loss Thursday night reflected those same team values of Attitude, Toughness, Discipline and Love.   He said everyone associated with the team had to own the loss and look first in the mirror, himself included.  He said we were dominated at the line of scrimmage when we tried to run the ball, and we didn’t tackle well.  There was no sugar-coating or excuse-making.  Just straight-up honesty.  Defeat can never be bargained with; it has to be declared unacceptable. 

But he also made a point to acknowledge how much his team was hurting in the locker room and how much he hurt for them.  “We still love our team, love our guys.  That doesn’t change.”  The players needed to "lock arms,” he said, and face this together.

Each one of us deals with an outcome like Thursday night's in our own unique way.  Some of you may fit into one or the other of the camps I've described, and some of you probably  have a foot in each.  The point is, we are all grieving this together with the players and coaches, united by our common love for Tulane and comforted in the knowledge that we all shared a common sense of loss Thursday night.  But we also share a common desire to set it right.  As former Navy SEAL David Goggins puts it, “It’s what you do with failure that makes you who you are.  What sets some of us apart is that when we fail, we can’t sleep at night.  It haunts us until we have our time at redemption.”  Misery may love company, but so does hope.

Our history teaches us that future opportunities like the one we had Thursday night are not guaranteed, nor are the number of days any of us may have left to wait for the next one.  That Baylor loss in 2005 turned out to be our last trip to the College World Series.  Hurricane Katrina came along a couple of months later and buried the baseball facility and the rest of the athletics complex under several feet of water.  Other dramatic changes to the sport followed, and we haven't been in the national baseball conversation since.  So the sadness must be recognized and felt and accepted, because it's as authentic and genuine as the joy we all felt in the two weeks leading up to what happened Thursday night.  Both emotions are a natural part of any life lived with passion and commitment.

But it's time to move on. "The 24 hour rule," coaches call it.  Feel it, own it, and then commit yourself to doing whatever you can to make the outcome different the next time opportunity knocks.  

Fortunately for all of us and for our football team, it's knocking already.  We have an opportunity to win a conference championship on Friday night in West Point against a ranked Army team that is undefeated in conference play and undefeated at home.  This game matters.  You get a ring and you hang a banner if you win this game.  You set the tone for the portal season that opens three days later and you declare that Tulane is still the class of this league.  You cement a very large brick in the wall of culture that we are building here.  You keep the opportunity alive to stack up three consecutive 11-win seasons. 

And for the team, this is a golden opportunity for another reason.  More than 30 of them walked on Senior Night.  This team will look very different next year, and nobody knows exactly what the bowl game roster will look like.  This is their last guaranteed chance to play with and for each other.  Think of some of the local seniors from the city playing in this game.  Tyler Grubbs.  Patrick Jenkins.  Josh Remetich.  Shaade Clayton-Johnson.  These are prideful young men who love this program.  This is a legacy game for them and their senior teammates.  Life doesn’t always afford you a second chance to make amends, to heal a scar, to change the way you’ll be remembered, to get the gang back together and ride again.

Friday is that chance. 

The last time we went up to West Point to play a ranked Army team was in 1996.  The game was in October, and Army crushed us 34-10 on the way to a 10-2 finish.  I still remember the Army fullback after the game saying that Tulane had no chance because the game was played in what he called "Army Ranger weather." When Tommy Bowden arrived the following season, he said staffers told him that some members of that '96 team had to be forcibly pulled out of the locker room to take the field in the second half.  Might have just been Bowden being Bowden, but the image stuck.

That phrase "Ranger weather" also stuck with me.  I wasn't up there that day, so I went back and checked the actual weather for that game on October 19, 1996.  Historical data shows temperatures in the low 50s, but a strong northeasterly wind gusting to 40 MPH undoubtedly made the conditions miserable.  Fast forward to December 2024, and the latest forecast for the title game Friday at 8 PM Eastern is 25 degrees at kickoff and falling.  That's a whole different level of challenge.  Collisions hurt more.  Footballs are harder and slicker.  It's harder to breathe.  Our quarterback is from California and most of our players are from the Deep South and have never experienced the conditions we are going to face Friday night.  It's a physical and psychological opponent that will have to be faced and defeated, along with the Army football team.  And make no mistake, this is a big game for Army and the brass that they answer to.  This is their first conference championship game appearance, ever.  Lest we forget, Army Coach Jeff Monken coveted the Tulane job last year and was passed over.  Monken is a master motivator and will undoubtedly have something extra in the tank for this one.  The Corps of Cadets in their long gray coats will surely be in a full lather at kickoff.  There are no ‘friendly confines’ where we’re going.  Tales of Southern teams who melt on frozen Northern fields in December are as old as the sport itself.

But I can promise you this.  Nobody will have to be pulled out of the visiting locker room and dragged onto that field.    You see, there's no more national chatter about us.  We fell out of the Coaches’ Poll and the AP Poll.  In fact we got only nine votes in the AP poll; last week we had 446.  The national media ranked Army instead, and Memphis.  We went from darlings to frauds in their eyes, the third best team in the league, just like that.  Army, of course, are always darlings and you'll see it in the broadcast Friday night.  Their quarterback got more face time on camera in a 49-14 loss two weeks ago than any ten men on the Notre Dame team that mauled them.

So we're the hunter Friday night.  The pundits have concluded that we’re the 'overrated, weak' team the Big 12 said we were when the last poll came out.  We're the ones with something to prove.  The chip should be back on the shoulder.

It won't be a game for the faint of heart.   We know what both teams want to do, and we know what kind of game this will be.    It’s going to be a trench game fought on a frozen surface, a test of will and endurance and fortitude.  And for one of the teams, a defining test of its resilience and culture and legacy.  Army can still make its season the following week by beating Navy.  For us, and especially for our seniors, this is all we’ve got.

We can't be sure how Tulane will handle the elements Friday night.  It's hard for the scout team to simulate playing in a freezer.   But we have been built, trained and led to win this kind of game.  "Ranger weather" or not, this isn't your father’s Tulane.  This isn’t 1996. 

Redemption awaits on the banks of the Hudson, for all of us.  Let’s get ‘em.