Tulane Green Wave Football Makes List of Top Coaching Hires This Century

The Tulane Green Wave have done a good job hiring head football coaches lately.

In current coach Jon Sumrall, Tulane has a rising star in the profession who turned his back on potential offers from power conference schools to remain in Uptown for a second season and try and build the Green Wave into American Athletic Conference champions for the second time in four years.

That’s the standard that Willie Fritz set before he left for the Houston Cougars after the 2023 season.

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Recently, CBS Sports college football writer Shehan Jeyarajah compiled the Top 25 coaching hires in the 21st century. One of the Green Wave’s coaching hires made the list.

It was Fritz who came in at No. 20, and you could make the argument that not only did he resurrect Tulane football, but he set the table for Sumrall to take it to the next level.

“He took over a program with only one bowl appearance in a decade and quickly turned them into a consistent winner, reaching five bowls in six years,” Jeyarajah wrote.

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When Fritz arrived from Georgia Southern before the 2016 season, he took over a program that had three winning seasons since Tommy Bowden left after the incredible 1998 campaign, when the Green Wave went 12-0 and went to the Liberty Bowl.

He methodically rebuilt the Green Wave. In his third year, 2018, Tulane had its first winning season since 2013. That kick-started three straight seasons with a bowl game, a first for the program.

After a down season in 2021 (2-10), Tulane soared to a 12-2 record, its first AAC title and a berth in the Cotton Bowl, where the Green Wave defeated national power USC. In the following season, the Green Wave went 11-3, reached the AAC title game again before losing and lost in the Military Bowl.

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Before the bowl game, Fritz was on his way to Houston and Sumrall would be hired weeks later. But his impact on the program’s future was clear after going 54-47 in eight seasons.

In Jeyarajah’s opinion, Fritz elevated the program to the point where it could “poach” Sumrall from Troy, where he was incredibly successful in his first two seasons as a head coach.

Sumrall led the Green Wave to a 9-5 season in 2024, taking them to the AAC title game for the third straight season before losing to Army West Point in the championship game. After that, Tulane fell to Florida in the Gasparilla Bowl. But that was the program’s sixth bowl game in seven years, a program record that started with Fritz at the controls.

For more Tulane news, head over to Tulane Green Wave On SI.