Weekly PFF Grades for Tulane Show Improvement in Almost All Categories
The Tulane-Southern Miss game has been set for a 6:00 p.m. kickoff in Yulman Stadium on Saturday, September 26th. The contest will be broadcast on ESPN+.
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What a difference a week makes!
The improvement between Week 1 and Week 2 is arguably the most crucial of a season, as teams try to make corrections or improve on what they did in game one.
Using Pro Football Forum (PFF) as one source of data, we are able to compare the Tulane football team's progress. PFF has analysts watch and chart every player on every single snap of every game, giving them a grade from 0 to 100 based on how well they execute their assignment. Here is how PFF breaks down their scale:
- 90+: Elite
- 80–89: Good
- 70–79: Above average
- 60–69: Average
- 50–59: Below average / bad
- 40–49: Poor
- 39 or lower: Very poor / terrible
Though we are more specific when we cover professional teams, we do not refer to individual players for Tulane. We believe an 18 or 19-year old shouldn't be put on the spot in this way.
As for the Green Wave, there is no doubt there was improvement. In fact, PFF saw it almost completely across the board when comparing the Duke game to the South Alabama contest.
Offense Triples a Category
The overall score from PFF for the Tulane offense soared from a 54.8 in Week 1 to an impressive 77. Leading the way, the Green Wave passing game, which jumped 15-points to a grade of 82.4.
As we expected, the biggest improvement was in pass blocking, as the Wave offense leapt from a paltry 25.7 versus Duke to 77.3.
See The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from the TU-USA game here.
The lowest score was in run blocking, which PFF graded at a 66.4, still better than the 55.3 the Green Wave scored a week earlier.
Remember: the Tulane offense was not doing well in the running game at the beginning with very few creases opening for its backs. It wasn't until Jaylin Lucas got into the run game that the Wave improved, which is why you see the final score of 66.4. Lucas was feted Monday by the American Conference in its Weekly Honor Roll.
Defense Shows Improvement, Except in One Category
The overall defensive play of Tulane moved up in almost every a category, making the PFF grade of 65.9, an eight-plus point improvement over the Duke game.
The one area where the Wave D did not move up was pass rushing, where the Greenies were down from a 64.3 in Week 1 to a 58.5 grade versus South Alabama.
The biggest improvement, overall, was in tackling. Though we made a point of saying how poor the tackling was against USA by the Wave, it had the biggest jump in grades, from 29.4 against Duke to 56.1 in Week 2, which is still considered a poor grade by PFF.
The highest grade for the Tulane defense was their rush D. Their 74.1 against the run was the Greenies' highest score of the week.
This week, the Green Wave travel to Manhattan to take on the unbeaten Kansas State Wildcats. K-State has opened a sizable favorite in the game. On Wednesday, we'll be Consorting with the Enemy, as we speak with On SI Kansas State lead writer Mark Kern. Excerpts of the online interview publishe Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. CT at On SI Tulane. Our YouTube Channel will have the conversation in its entirety Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. CT also.
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Doug has covered a gamut of sporting events in his fifty-plus years in the field. He started doing sideline reporting for Louisiana Tech football games for the student radio station. Doug was Sports Director for KNOE-AM/FM in Monroe in the mid-80s, winning numerous awards from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association for Best Sportscast and Best Play-by-Play. High school play-by-play for teams in Monroe, Natchitoches, New Orleans, and Thibodaux, LA dot his resume. He did college play-by-play for Northwestern State University in Natchitoches for nine years. Then, moving to the Crescent City, Doug did television PBP of Tulane games and even filled in for legendary Tulane broadcaster, Ken Berthelot in the only game Kenny ever missed while doing the Green Wave games. His father was an alumnus of Tulane in the 1940s, so Doug has attended Tulane football games in old Tulane Stadium, the Superdome, and Yulman. He was one of the 86,000 plus on December 1, 1973, sitting in the North End Zone to seeTulane shutout the LSU Tigers, 14-0. He was there when the Posse ruled Fogelman and in Turchin when the Wave made it to the World Series. He currently is the public address voice of the Tulane baseball team.