Strike Up the Band: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

STRIKE UP THE BAND

In my senior year of high school, the band Molly Hatchet released a single called “Flirtin’ With Disaster” and the Rolling Stones released “Emotional Rescue.”  Those titles  seem to fit our 2025 football team.  In two of our first four wins we had to recover onside kicks at the end to preserve victories.  In our last two wins we had to come from behind in the fourth quarter and then survive Hail Mary throws into our end zone on the final play. Can we keep doing this?  How many lives do we have?

“You are what your record says you are,” Coach Bill Parcells once said about his team.    “They are who we thought they were,” Coach Denny Green said after a game against  what he thought was an overrated opponent.

Two coaches, two different ways to assess a team.  On the one hand, they keep score for a reason, and the “W” column is the only stat that matters.  On the other, wasn’t the eye test accurate in 2023, when we ended up getting mauled when we finally saw a quality opponent in the conference championship game?  And what about Ole Miss?

I know some Tulane fans who are in the Denny Green camp. They’ve seen enough to conclude that we aren’t getting through this schedule without another loss or two, and that we aren’t a championship caliber team.  I know other Tulane fans who are with Parcells.  They point out that we are 6-1 and earned every win, we’re battle-tested, and now we have an improving quarterback, a rapidly developing passing game and a now-healthy and fresh-legged Number One tailback ready to be unleashed on the back half of the schedule. 

It’s not fair to call it a “head vs. heart” comparison between these two groups, because we’re 14-3 in one-score games the past four years (USM and UCF in ’22, and Kansas State last year, were the losses). It might feel like living on the edge, but we seem pretty comfortable there.

Well, at least the TEAM seems comfortable there.  I certainly wasn’t on Saturday.  Truth be told, a lot of this game felt like last year’s Army game, especially in the second half when they started leaning on our defense.  Army was 0-7 on third down in the first half, and 6-8 in the second half.  “They’re just too strong,” my 83-year-old mother said early in the fourth quarter as Army began its last touchdown drive.  “It’s like watching a bulldozer.”

On that same drive that put Army up 17-10, we also saw what I think was the first full-blown ripped and thrown headset from Coach Sumrall on a Tulane sideline.  It came when an official prematurely awarded Army the ball after a fumble.  Army’s Tex Brannan dove for the ball and got there a split second before Tulane safety Kevin Adams did.  Adams emerged from the scrum with the ball.  Brannan is a 6’5, 245 pound tight end.  Adams is a 5’10, 185 pound safety.  If you believe that Brannan had that ball firmly secured on the ground under his body and had it “ripped away” by Adams, you can only be a West Point grad or an AAC game official.  Isn’t it enough to thank the Cadets for their service after the game is over?

But fortune favors the bold, and we were bold at the end.  I’m not sure I would have had the courage to use our timeouts with less than two minutes left when we hadn’t made Army go three-and-out all game.  It felt like we may have been giving them a gift to go along with their quarterback’s legs, their three timeouts and their suddenly potent passing attack.  It was a gamble but Coach Sumrall was playing to win, and it paid off spectacularly.  Army got conservative, we got feisty, and they ended up making the cardinal mistake of giving the ball back to Jake Retzlaff in a late game situation.  In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Never strike the king unless you are sure you will kill him.”  Never punt the ball to him late in a ball game either.  The guy’s been here less than three months, and he already feels like our very own olive-and-blue Tom Brady in those situations. 

Around the same time “Flirtin’ With Disaster” and “Emotional Rescue” came out the year before I enrolled at Tulane, the Eagles released “Heartache Tonight” and Gloria Gaynor released “I Will Survive.”  Any one of those titles or a thousand others might end up symbolizing the legacy of this team. 

So the key to enjoying this wild, unpredictable concert performance of a season is not to get too caught up in trying to predict what the set list is going to be, but to just enjoy the music.  Think of it like going to Yulman Stadium Saturday.  Yes, you had to navigate barricaded streets, axle-breaking potholes and 55 minutes of in-game frustration.  But in the end you got to see that ball drop from above into Shazz Preston’s hands, like manna from heaven.  The beautiful part about every football season is that it can turn on a dime, week to week or quarter to quarter or even play to play.  You just never really know, and if you did it wouldn’t be very much fun.  

What I do know is that at a time when so many teams have fired their coaches already and so many others are just playing out the string, it feels good to be alive and kicking, warts and all, heading into Halloween.  We can all dance to that.