Tulane Football Coach Reflects on Mentor Lessons Amid Assistant Changes

Tulane Green Wave head coach Jon Sumrall shares insights learned from his mentors throughout his journey in college football.

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The Tulane Green Wave snagged a rising young star in Jon Sumrall, who came over to the football team after just two seasons as head coach of the Troy Trojans.

Sumrall is only 42 years old but has a wealth of wisdom from his mentors throughout various coaching stops in college football.

As Sumrall has detailed to Tulane on Sports Illustrated, his mentors mean everything to him and have shaped him into the coach and person he is, detailing his journey under Neal Brown and Mark Stoops.

In a recent interview on Josh Pate’s College Football Show, Sumrall shared the sage advice he took from each figure and worked into his philosophy as a head coach, including a memorable anecdote from a third head coach he never worked with: Eli Drinkwitz.

Stoops taught him to slow down and not hurry hiring his staff and that there’s no award for rushing the process. He also told Sumrall not to focus on hiring friends. Brown was a master of detail and showed Sumrall structure organization and how to plan and manage.

He then divulged the advice Drinkwitz provided him when he called him up in 2021 and asked him for insight.

“So, Drink’s at Missouri, I take the job at Troy, and I call him and say, ‘Hey, give me one thing I should do,” Sumrall said. “He told me, put full buyouts for your coaches for six months in their contracts till June. That way, if anybody tries to poach anybody on your staff from a higher level, they have to pay a buyout. I'm like, that's a great idea. It makes sense. I don't want to have full buyouts on the coaches forever, but the first little block when we get the staff together, that's fair, and I think reasonable.”

It's a strong piece of advice for a first-time head coach attempting to assemble a staff around him, one that provides necessary stability to get a handle on the role. If all the personnel around you keep dropping like flies, no coach can succeed in building a program—especially at the first stop in their career.

Drinkwitz’s advice paid off, quite literally, when he himself came calling after that period to inquire about a coach.

“About two months later, Drink calls me,” Sumrall said. “He goes, ‘Hey, did you put full buyouts in those contracts? And I said, Yeah, why? What’s up? He goes, I want to hire Al Pogue. Al is the corners coach. Al's now with Drink at Missouri, but Missouri had to pay a buyout. Therefore, at Troy, we got new headsets that year for Al.”

Much like the Green Wave head coach spoke about instilling buyouts in player contracts to recoup losses, he ensured that his program was protected and was able to purchase new equipment as a result of the intel.

While Drinkwitz was directly responsible for the loss of his defensive back coach, he was the one to insulate Sumrall from his own efforts.

“We made a trade for Al and some new headsets and a new DB coach,” Sumrall said. “I think you have to be a constant learner, and people that have been in the experience that you're in, you can glean something from them if you're selfless enough and maybe not prideful to pick up the phone and go, ‘Hey, what would you do? What did you do? What did you not know? I have a notebook full of stuff that I wrote down from people that had been in that chair that I could maybe use some of their wisdom on.”

The best leaders are those who learn and lead from insights gleaned from others. While joking about Al and the headsets in a funny tale, Sumrall showed both his personality and ability to adapt to his mentor's advice and lead Tulane football to great heights.