Tulane Football Coach Shares Candid Thoughts on Brutal Cycle of NIL, Transfer Portal

Tulane Green Wave football head coach faces the challenge of developing star players and having to find their replacements in the transfer portal.

Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

The Tulane Green Wave football team has a head coach who is accepting of the NIL and transfer portal era, but that doesn’t make the departures sting less.

The portal has turned college football into a headache with a heightened challenge of roster retention that Tulane football coach Jon Sumrall felt the effects of this offseason.

Sumrall joined the Green Wave’s flagship station, 106.7 The Ticket, last week to break down the harsh reality of losing star talent like quarterback Darian Mensah and running back Makhi Hughes.

“There are plenty of people with more money to pay their players than we’ve got,” Sumrall said. “We lost our quarterback. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the place. It was financial. It was a lot of money. If you gave us the option of keeping all our players on the roster, I would do that. It’s challenging. It can be frustrating at times.” 

While Sumrall sees turnover as inevitable, and he’s right, it’s dictated by a system lacking guardrails and can frustrate coaches simply trying to win games on the field.

He sees the job of head coach as one that needs to adapt and evolve with the times. That’s easier said than done when giving a shot to an unknown redshirt freshman leads to him receiving one of the biggest NIL deals in college football from another program.

“A year ago, half the people in the program didn’t know how to say Darian’s last name,” Sumrall said. “It’s our job to develop the next guy. It’s so important, so vital as a coach, not to allow these things to steal your joy. While it may be frustrating to lose a guy that you helped grow and develop, it’s our job to develop the next guy.” 

Tulane is in the midst of a consecutive quarterback competition as a result of developing the last signal caller.

While practices have been upbeat, the battle under center has been intriguing to watch, and the head coach has the right attitude; the sobering reality remains that those efforts may all be for one season of success at best.

Then a more lucrative program might come calling and leave the Group of Five team at the mercy of a budget they’re unable to compete with.

“Duke bought our quarterback for more than our entire NIL budget,” Sumrall said bluntly.

That stings when, previously, that quarterback had one FBS offer from the program he left. But the players are not responsible for the state of college sports.

Unfortunately, neither are college football coaches, and their job description has expanded in a rather demanding way to either evolve or get out. 

The Green Wave are lucky to have Sumrall at the helm as a strong example of the former, despite talent losses that many teams would not recover from in one offseason.