Normal: the Gators are playing a game at 3:30 pm in the state of Florida. Not normal: it’s on Friday. Welcome to game day for the 2024 Gasparilla Bowl, the finest postseason game named after a festival that itself was named after a fictional pirate.
I’m not going to do a detailed rundown of the game, as Andrew, Nick, and Gentry did a good job of previewing the game in their roundtable. To go in a different kind of direction, I will instead walk you through how I developed my expectations for the game. Let’s start with some background. I promise it’ll be worth it.
For starters, Tulane is in much better shape than it usually is. The Green Wave were a founding SEC member but left, more or less, because it decided it couldn’t keep up with the rest of the conference athletically and emphasized academics more. After a peak season in 1949, it became a downtrodden program for most of the time since and are under .500 all-time.
The Green Wave finally broke through three years ago in Willie Fritz’s seventh year. Fritz had spent a long time as a head coach in D-II before hopping up to Sam Houston State, Georgia Southern, and then Tulane.
He runs a funky offense that has a lot of option and triple option principles to it, so it carried something of a stigma — as in, triple option is a thing you only run if you can’t match up athletically. There’s some truth to that; the service academies with their height and weight limits run it for a reason. Hiring someone even triple-adjacent can be seen in some circles as giving up.
Well, Houston hired Fritz to replace Dana Holgorsen, and so Tulane turned to Jon Sumrall. He’s an Alabama native who really sounds like it with how talks about his “progrum”. He’s spent all of five years outside the South, those being as an assistant at the University of San Diego from 2007-11. He played linebacker at Kentucky and has coached at UK, Tulane, Troy, and Ole Miss. All of those except the last are places he had multiple stints.
Sumrall had gone 23-4 in two years at Troy in his only other head coaching experience, and he took most of the Trojan staff with him. That means that there was some schematic turnover, since no one else quite runs Fritz’s offense. Sumrall himself has been a defensive ace for quite some time.
Here’s where we distill all that into a takeaway. Tulane is historically a loser, but they found a Lance Leipold/Kalen DeBoer type in Fritz. He spent many years building a strong foundation, and that foundation survived his move to Houston.
Tulane has been pretty good for three straight years now, but it was bound to be a little rocky between a major change on offense and the departure of QB Michael Pratt. And it was: the Green Wave was competitive with but ultimately lost to the two P4 teams it played, and it also lost to the two best AAC teams it played in Memphis and Army. The Green Wave is a team that won’t let someone run away with a game without a fight.
Now, offense. It doesn’t take much research to see that Tulane mainly had a three-man attach. Triggerman Darian Mensah attempted 96% of the team’s passes. Running back Makhi Hughes had a hair under 50% of the team’s total non-sack carries, and he had three times as many as the next-highest rusher. USC transfer receiver Mario Williams had 60% more catches than the next guy and 60% more yards than the next guy. The only other thing that pops out is that tight end Alex Bauman had seven touchdowns across 18 catches, so watch for him in the red zone.
Mensah hit the portal and chose Duke, so he’s out for the game. If backup Ty Thompson, who’s also going to transfer but will play the bowl, was anywhere close to Mensah, he’d have more than 11 pass attempts on the year. Instead, he ran more than he passed in most of his garbage time play in blowout wins. It’s clear from the stats that there was never a plan to get Thompson much involved, and when you note Thompson being a junior and Mensah a freshman, it’s even more obvious why things played out as they did.
As for the defense, here’s the fun part. Sumrall was an assistant for Mark Stoops at Kentucky in 2019-20 and then coordinated the defense for a year in 2021. Though he worked for a lot of different head coaches, much of what he does syncs nicely with what Stoops does.
You may recall that Florida played Stoops’s defense this year. DJ Lagway threw for 18.5 yards per pass — not per completion, per pass — and Jadan Baugh ran for five touchdowns. It was a pretty okay day, all things considered.
Even when you turn to advanced stat systems that adjust for quality of opponent, the numbers say Kentucky had a better defense than Tulane did this year. With UF not losing any offensive line starters to the portal or opt outs, it bodes well for the game. If they can keep Lagway clean, he will know what to do against the defense.
Tulane will give the Gators a good effort. However, the entire offense relied on Mensah, and he’s gone to Durham. The defense is susceptible to what Florida likes to do, and Lagway shredded the best comp for the it.
I will agree with my esteemed colleagues that the most likely outcome is UF covering the 14-point spread. Now I hope you better understand my thought process in getting there.