What Worries Us about the 2026 Tulane Football Team

Fresh off their first ever appearance in the College Football Playoffs, the 2026 version of Tulane football finds itself in a unique position: only filling about 20-slots on its roster from that history-making team, yet picked by many to not appear in the CFP field again. In fact, most prognosticators are not choosing the Wave to even win the American Conference. We have our own thoughts that you can find here.

There are reasons for the Green Wave not being selected to succeed by many, making Tulane fans nervous going into this Fall. Here are the top reasons we are biting our nails as well.

New Coach Must Prove Himself

Let's address the elephant in the room: new coach Will Hall was not successful as a Division-I head coach his last time around. His experiences before 2021 seemed to prepare him for the role as a D-I coach:
- Head coach at D-II West Alabama and West Georgia from 2011-2016, piling up an impressive 56-20 record between those two, taking them to Division-II playoffs and semifinal berths in four of those six years.
- Trips to Louisiana, Memphis, and Tulane had Hall serve as either an offensive coordinator or assistant head coach from 2017-2020 before getting the top slot at Southern Miss in 2021.

Hall started with a 3-9 season in his first year in Hattiesburg, then jumped up to a 7-6 record in 2022 and an appearance in the Lending Tree Bowl, beating Rice. After that, though, the wheels came off, as the Golden Eagles suffered through a 3-9 year in 2023, then a 1-6 start to 2024 before Hall being fired three-quarters of the way through the season.

He came back to Tulane last year as the passing game coordinator and was hired as the head coach of the Wave after Jon Sumrall's departure for Florida.

Hall is the first to admit he needed to learn from his previous mistakes at Southern Miss, going as far as to say he filled up four pages of notes after his dismissal from USM of what he had done wrong and how he would do it differently.

Though that is reassuring, it is something that is concerning, nonetheless, to Tulane fans and those who watch the program from afar.

The Quarterback Room

Last year at this time, the Tulane quarterback room was undecided except for one thing: coaches were not quite comfortable with the folks who populated that room to lead the Green Wave to an outstanding year. Then, in the third week of July, 2025, Jake Retzlaff fell into Tulane's collective lap. The rest, as they say, is history.

As we have pointed out here, two quarterbacks were expected to vie for the starting quarterbacking job for the 2026 season: junior Kadin Semonza, who had bided his time at Tulane, and senior Houston transfer Zeon Chriss-Gremillion. After four weeks of Spring, instead of separating themselves from the pack (and each other), Semonza and Zeon instead found themselves in a four-way battle for the starting slot this Fall with true freshman Trace Johnson and sophomore local guy Dagan Bruno.

Neither Chriss-Gremillion nor Semonza did enough take a lead over each other: Zeon showed flashes of incredible athleticism, but we noticed he tended to zone in on a single receiver at times; Semonza had some incredible touch on his passes sometimes, but made poor decisions at others.

Frosh QB Johnson showed good instinct for a youngster early in camp going through progressions well and always seeming to pick the right one to stop on, but showed his youth toward the end of the Spring making youthful mistakes, which was to be expected.

Redshirt sophomore Bruno was hardly a noticable blip on the QB radar in early camp, but came on strong toward the end, showing poise, a strong, accurate arm, and good decision making.

If it was a perfect world, you'd love to have your starting quarterback figured out by the end of Spring. That hasn't happened for two years straight, and there's no Jake Retzlaff in the transfer pipe that we know of.

That makes us a little nervous.

Offensive Line Not There Yet

Offensive line coach Cody Kennedy was playing musical chairs with his lineman this Spring: trying to find out who fit where. That led to a lack of cohesiveness throughout March and April.

Early in his tenure as Los Angeles Chargers head coach, Jim Harbaugh famously talked about how important the offensive line is to a team. Here is a YouTube video of that quote as well:

In the On SI 49ers article above, Harbaugh goes on to describe the offensive line as a fist, "five of them, playing as one." That is what everyone is hoping for from the Tulane offensive front. Losing everyone except Reese Baker from last year's team makes for a sort of starting-all-over again scenario for the Green Wave. Kennedy knows that, and worked through various people in numerous positions. That led to a pretty dominant performance by the defense in quite a few cases in the Spring.

You hope this unit will jell as the Summer wears on and as Fall ball progresses. You can have a pretty mediocre quarterback and still be successful behind an outstanding line. We are not saying Tulane's quarterback situation is "meh." We are just stating how important an offensive line is. As of the end of Spring, the most important unit on the team is not quite there yet.

Next week, we'll talk about what is making us excited about 2026, and there's a lot ot be pumped about, especially if you're a defensive kind of guy.

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