Tulane Coach Torches His Own ‘Average’ Team After It Lands Spot in CFP Rankings

With two weeks left in the regular season, Green Wave coach Jon Sumrall is not satisfied.

Tulane may be winning, but coach Jon Sumrall demands more. / Stephen Lew-Imagn Images

In an ever-changing American Conference landscape, the inside track to the final College Football Playoff berth currently belongs to Tulane.

The Green Wave's 35–24 win over Florida Atlantic Saturday—a win that moved Tulane to 8-2 on the year—was sufficient to jump them up to No. 24 in Tuesday's CFP rankings. However, coach Jon Sumrall is not satisfied with the Green Wave's performance—and had no problem saying so Wednesday evening.

"There's some days I feel we're in the bottom 25 teams in the country watching us play," Sumrall said via Justin Margolius of KCBD-TV in Lubbock, Texas. "There must be a lot of bad football going on if we're one of the top 25 teams."

Tulane owns a slew of good wins this year—Northwestern, Duke, East Carolina and Memphis—but has also fallen flat at times, most notably in a 48–26 blowout loss to UTSA on Oct. 30. If the season ended today, the Green Wave would visit Texas Tech for a CFP game; that kind of performance wouldn't play in Lubbock or anywhere.

"We're average," Sumrall said. "We're an average team. We get either six or seven days depending on the schedule of the week to promote ourselves or embarrass ourselves, and we've done that before. We better get ready to play. I watched us practice today, I think we're average."

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