The Show Must Go On: A Scandurro Story

BY TIM SCANDURRO

If I’m lucky enough to get down on the field during warmups, I always like to ask multiple staff members how they’re feeling about the game.  Football coaches tend to reside on the confident, testosterone-fueled end of the spectrum, so I almost always get some variation of how confident they are in the team’s preparation and the opponent weaknesses they’ve identified and plan to attack.

Saturday in Oxford was a little different.  You will always hear coaches stress “winning the turnover battle” regardless of opponent, but you don’t always hear “we need to be at least plus two.”  The coaches understood what we all did going in:  to win this game we would need to execute at a high level, protect the ball, make very few mistakes,  end drives with scores, turn them over multiple times, and get some breaks. 

A lot needed to go right.  Defensively the plan was to keep them in front of us, limit explosive plays, and make them have to execute nickel-and-dime drives down the length of the field.  To do that you have to tackle, or a nickel and dime play can become a silver dollar play in a hurry against the kind of skill players we were facing.  Ole Miss won the toss and took the ball first, not a surprise from a team that had rolled through us in September and scored five consecutive touchdowns a few games later against Georgia in Athens.

On the first play they threw a simple hitch in the flat, we came up and missed the tackle, and it turned into an explosive play.  On the second play they froze our linebackers for a split second with a fake toss and ran their extremely talented tight end on a crosser behind them for another big gain.  On the third play they handed the ball off and we had the perfect play call with our Spear coming off the edge unblocked. Their all-conference back stopped and let him fly by and then bolted untouched through the middle of the defense for a score.  Three plays and less than a minute had elapsed.  As Graff used to say:  good morning, good afternoon and good night.

Offensively the consensus was that we would need to score at least 30 to have a chance, since Ole Miss had scored 30 or more in every game except for a pair of 24-point performances in midseason.  We moved the ball fairly consistently but turned it over three times and failed to convert any of our four fourth downs.  We missed blocks on key plays, threw errantly on others, and dropped at least five passes.  We made plays here and there on both sides but just didn’t play consistently and made way too many mistakes.

Some of it, maybe most of it, was the quality of the opponent.  In the words of the old Prussian maxim, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.  It was evident that we had some players who were a little intimidated; some that gave everything they had but were overmatched; and some that competed hard and gave as good as they got and could play meaningfully in Ole Miss’s league.  Not enough of the latter, but we knew that already, and if you were standing on the field pregame and watching some of the specimens in Ole Miss jerseys warming up  you understood that.  They had a defensive end who ran Jake Retzlaff down from behind on a scramble, and later swam between Derrick Graham and Shadre Hurst, our two best linemen, for a sack on a three-man rush.  Neither of those things happened all year, and one guy did both of them in the same quarter. 

But it was still disappointing that we weren’t able to get that game down to one score in the third quarter and put some pressure on them.  By the time we hit the fourth quarter our seats, which were in the row immediately behind the Ole Miss band’s tuba section, had transformed the “can’t see sh*t” viewing experience from a curse into a blessing. I drove straight back after the game.  There was plenty of time for reflection on that long drive, and my thoughts turned to the current mindset of Green Wave Nation. 

One memorable aspect of Saturday was the roar that Coach Pete Golding got when he emerged from the tunnel long before kickoff.  It was louder than any cheer during the game, and it was hard not to feel the contrast between the way Ole Miss fans greeted their internal promotion hire and the way many Tulane fans greeted ours.  The circumstances, of course, were wildly different in terms of both the way their predecessors chose to leave and the process that resulted in their selections, but I’m not going to get into that.  The circumstances were similar in that they introduced profound change and uncertainty into the futures of the two programs.  Both were going from successful CFP-qualifying coaches and program managers to….who knows?  And that’s always going to create anxiety whether you like or hate the hire, because you just don’t know how it’s going to work out.

You might think I was driving straight back after the game to get as far away from Oxford as possible, but you’d be wrong.  My older daughter was getting “surprise-engaged” Sunday morning in Audubon Park, an elaborate production with various people flying in from all over in the kind of made-for-Instagram scene that seems to be so popular today.

I got to thinking that there are some similarities between your school hiring a new football coach and your daughter getting engaged, most of which revolve around a combination of two things.  The first is the deep and abiding affection you have for your child (or your football team),  your willingness to go to any lengths to see them prosper and thrive, and the heartache you feel when they don’t.  The second is the realization that you can’t predict the future and to a very large extent you can’t control the ultimate success of the enterprise.

We really like this young man, who met my daughter when they were both students at Tulane, a lot.  But I’m sure at least some of you have had a little more internal friction in this scenario,  or have at least seen it with others.  So as a good father or mother, what do you do?  You do what Ole Miss fans did Saturday.  You rally around the choice that’s been made by making your own choice:  I choose to support this union and, until I have evidence from this marriage otherwise, I choose to believe that this is going to be a successful marriage and I will do everything that I can, publicly and privately, to help ensure that outcome.

Here’s one thing you don’t hear good fathers or mothers say:  “This is going to be a disaster.  I’m out.”  Or the supposedly ‘supportive’ version, which is:  “This is going to be a disaster, but I hope I’m wrong.”

Here’s the deal.  We all have the choice to curse or bless the things that are important to us.  In my humble opinion, we need to treat the new coach like the new fiancé’.  It’s just as easy to hope you’re right than to hope you’re wrong, and it gives you a powerful incentive to do what it takes to help your hope come true. 

The same holds true of college football in general.  Many fans in the wake of Saturday’s disappointment will conclude that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is just too big and we can’t get there from here, so what’s the point?  When Scott Cowen said exactly that 22 years ago, people who knew he was wrong stood up together and said no, this football program has value to this community and this campus.  This past few years has given us proof of concept, and the administration is awakening to that fact.  So why would we choose to emulate Scott Cowen now?  Or Blake Baker, for that matter?

Look, we don’t know what’s going to happen to college football at large or our program in the next few years.  Nobody knows, not even ESPN.  Our job is to keep swinging the hammer and making ourselves as attractive as we can.  We need to keep moving forward. William Faulkner wrote in Intruder in the Dust about “the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make for home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.”

That is the choice of every human being when they contemplate investing in the future of a marriage, or a football team, or anything else.  There are never any guarantees but the quintessentially American experience is to believe, to have faith, to press on into the great unknown, to find a way or make one.  It’s our national inheritance, coursing through your veins  and mine.

So I sure hope that as the sting of Saturday fades, it gives way to a renewed sense of purpose and resolve to keep building, to keep investing, to help the new coach succeed, and to have confidence that we will find a successful path forward in 2026 and beyond.  This CFP season doesn’t have to be the end of anything, if we choose to make it the beginning of something better.  As Sumrall always said, when something bad happens we say ‘good.’

I lost a football game Saturday night but gained a future son-in-law Sunday morning, and I pray that grandkids in little Tulane outfits won’t be far behind.  And I pray that when they get here they will be the inheritors of the championship legacy all of you have helped build.  There’s every reason to expect that they will be, because we’re a football school now.

The portal opens in about a week, and spring practice will be here before you know it.  We’re not one and done, not by a long shot.   Forward.  Always forward.

Merry Christmas and Roll Wave.