Exploring Tulane Coach Jon Sumrall’s Days as College Football Player

The Tulane Green Wave want to hang onto head coach Jon Sumrall for a long time.

His success after one season put him on the radar of several open jobs, most notably North Carolina. But he enters his second season in Uptown trying to put Tulane back in the American Athletic Conference championship game for the fourth straight year — at minimum.

He wants his program to be competitive at the highest levels, not just at the Group of 5 level. He has a good idea what it takes. He coached in the SEC. But he also played in the SEC.

ESPN recently revealed a ranking of all FBS coaches based on their time as players in college football. Sumrall’s experience is relevant here.

Jon Sumrall’s Kentucky Playing Days

The list was tiered and Sumrall made the power 4 key contributors tier. These were players that played in the current power four conferences but weren’t stars.

The list included South Carolina’s Shane Beamer, Illinois’ Bret Bielema, Georgia State’s Dell McGee, Stanford’s Frank Reich, West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez, BYU’s Kalani Sitake and Kentucky’s Mark Stoops.

Stoops and Sumrall are connected because the latter worked for Stoops as an assistant coach, spending 2019-20 as an inside linebackers coach and 2021 as a co-defensive coordinator.

Sumrall comes by linebacking naturally. Per ESPN, he was a wo-time all-state high school player in Huntsville, Ala. That led to a scholarship at Kentucky, where he was a three-year letterman and started in the middle in 2004. That season he led the Wildcats with 72 tackles. He also had a sack and an interception.

After his playing days, the NFL did not come calling. So he stayed at Kentucky as a graduate assistant for two years before taking his first full-time job with San Diego in 2007. By 2011 he was the assistant head coach, defensive coordinator and linebackers coach for the FCS school.

That’s when Tulane came calling the first time. In 2012, then-head coach Curtis Johnson hired him to be the co-defensive coordinator and defensive line coach. The following year he took over linebackers while retaining co-DC duties.

He left the Green Wave after 2013 to take similar duties at Troy for three seasons before joining Ole Miss as a linebackers coach in 2018 and then Stoops’ staff at Kentucky the following season.

In 2022 he took over as Troy’s head coach led the Trojans to a 23-4 record, two Sun Belt Conference championships and a bowl victory. He took over for Willie Fritz at Tulane last season and led the Green Wave to a 9-5 record, an AAC title game appearance and a trip to the Gasparilla Bowl.