Tulane Football: Can Green Wave maintain their momentum in 2020?

Though Tulane football faded down the stretch after a 5-1 start, it still reached a second straight bowl. Can it return to bowl eligibility in 2020?

Before its recent run under Willie Fritz, Tulane had earned two consecutive bowl trips only once before in school history.

In 1979, Larry Smith coached the Green Wave to a 9-2 regular season and a 9-6 loss to Penn State in the Liberty Bowl before taking over at Arizona. A year later, Vince Gibson took over the program and led his new charges to a 7-4 regular season and a beatdown by Arkansas in the Hall of Fame Bowl.

The past two seasons have gone much better for Fritz’s Tulane squads, at least in the postseason. Back-to-back 7-6 records concluded with victories in the 2018 Cure Bowl over Louisiana and the 2019 Armed Forces Bowl over Southern Miss. It isn’t the perfect run of 1998, by any means, but Tulane has evolved into a respectable mid-tier American Athletic Conference challenger.

Now comes the challenge for Fritz and the Green Wave. The successes of the past few seasons were largely built on the back of a squad that no longer plays football for the New Orleans institution. The big question for this program heading into the 2020 season is whether they have reached their ceiling at seven wins a season or whether they can retool and continue the march toward AAC contention.

The freshly-flipped roster will help answer that question relatively quickly this season. Let’s dive in to look at the offense and defense at Tulane before breaking down the 2020 Green Wave schedule and making some predictions on how the next campaign will play out.