Tulane Green Wave Opens Competitive Spring Football With Fierce Mentality

Tulane Green Wave football team showed a lot of promise in their first spring practice and bolstered the value of coaching staff retention.

Credit: Tulane Athletics / Football

The Tulane Green Wave began spring practice Tuesday in preparation for the 2025 college football season with a lot of new faces to watch. 

Tulane football head coach Jon Sumrall mentioned that during the offseason period, players were in jerseys with their names instead of numbers due to the amount of roster turnover. 

While things felt markedly different with the transfer portal movement, the Green Wave had a competitive opening session for spring camp.

The quarterback competition between TJ Finley, Kadin Semonza, and Donovan Leary drew eyes and will continue to throughout the 15 practices and spring game.

On first impressions, all quarterbacks looked farther along in their confidence and understanding of the offense than the three who battled last year. 

Finley and Semonza bring considerable experience, yet Leary showed a similar poise. It’s impossible and ill-advised to make snap judgments off the opening two-hour session, and they all showed strengths and moments where things are still coming along.

That also applies to the receivers, who, Sumrall noted to reporters after practice, were sometimes running the wrong route on some misses, coloring the analysis of those observing the competition.

The most surprising aspect of the practice was how far along the team chemistry felt with the level of departure in the transfer portal and considerable additions.

Darian Mensah had a poise to him that the others didn’t consistently display, and it’s fair to say all three competitors showed that trait on Tuesday.

This time last spring, the defensive back room was so inexperienced that Sumrall would joke about lining up at cornerback. Evaluating skill players at receiver and assessing the quarterbacks was challenging due to the lack of game-speed coverage. 

The staff learned from that and brought in several transfer portal additions that made the receivers work for reps.

Ultimately, the biggest takeaway was how valuable coaching staff retention is—and that’s rare in college football.

Rather than spending time installing with a group of entirely new players, both the offensive and defensive coordinators can build off their body of work from last season.

There was a lot of uncertainty with a new staff and a new starting quarterback in Sumrall’s first year.

The way they handled the quarterback competition drew the current prospects over to the program.

It’s clear that the culture centered around the four core values of attitude, toughness, discipline, and love has a buy-in that stuck and transferred over into a competitive, promising opening session.