When their teams play Thursday or Friday games, football coaches tend to change the day of the week when they are talking, referring to Monday as Wednesday and so forth to keep everyone on track as if it were a Saturday game. This week I have had to work a day in advance for The Advocate because of weather concerns, and I fell victim to that thought process when I talked to Jon Sumrall on the phone after practice and asked him what time the team was flying to Oklahoma "tomorrow." My brain already thought it was Thursday. Oops. He explained they weren't leaving until Friday, and I had to explain to him why I had made the mistake.
But enough rambling minutia on my part. Tulane practiced early this morning at the Saints indoor facility because the Saints were practicing later this morning at the same site, so the length had to be reduced to about an hour. I did not see a single second of practice this week--Mondays never are open and the last two days were indoors because of approaching Francine--which is also true of the last time Tulane traveled to Oklahoma in 2021, when the team practiced in Birmingham the whole week. Something about Oklahoma being on the schedule produces the worst in Mother Nature.
Here is what Sumrall said when he called me:
"They (the Saints) moved their practice up, but in turn we moved ours up, too and sort of frontloaded our day. We met yesterday on what we were going to do in today's practice. Now we're at the hotel and the guys are doing some academic work for the next couple of hours, so we were able to get to the Saints and get not a full practice. We probably cut our practice down by about half, but we at least got something done."
On if he is comfortable with what happened with practice time the last two days:
"Yeah, ideally you'd like to get everything you'd normally get, but if you get told you have from 7:45 to 8:45 to practice in here, then you figure out instead of an hour and 20 or an hour and a half or whatever, we get 55 minutes and what's mandatory after warming up, which takes about 10 minutes, and then after that, we pared it down to what's most needed. Look, we got enough work in to be sharp and be prepared."
On potential for upper 90s temperature for Oklahoma game:
"From a mental standpoint our guys are a little bit used to that. There is a physical piece where we haven't got that heat this week. Usually we're the ones that are probably most used to that climate, where the last few days here we have not gotten that kind of conditioning. That is maybe a slight concern, but the biggest thing is making sure our guys are hydrated and ready to go. A week ago yesterday was the hottest practice we had all training camp, so it's not like we haven't had one in a while, so we've had some of that. Hopefully it shouldn't be too much of a factor."
On Dontae Fleming locking up Kansas State DB the entire time while Alex Bauman ran about 20 yards for a touchdown:
"Every Monday we do a not our standard tape and a setting the standard tape on the review of the game. and that Monday setting-the-standard reel had that play for a reason. We showed it to the whole team and said, hey, look, this is what team football looks like. If you don't have the ball in your hand, you go make a block and you go sustain a block. I'm very proud of Dontae. Obviously week 1 he didn't have the performance he wanted. I was very proud of his response week 2 and I have a lot of faith in him and trust in him because of how he's wired and cares. It's important to him, and to see him make that sort of a selfless contribution to the success of somebody else's effort and to the team effort, we highlighted that in front of our entire team on the set-the-standard tape and made sure the whole team recognized that it doesn't matter what position you play, you can do something maybe sometimes outside your normal job description that is extra effort to help the team have success."
On schedule for Thursday:
"I'm currently crossing Canal Street to the Sheraton figuring out where can we walk through tomorrow maybe. We'll probably stay on the hotel premises tomorrow depending on how this thing hits and how many of our guys have and don't have power, we may stay in the hotel through Friday, which we're kind of working through. We've got contingency planning of what if everything goes great and what if everything doesn't go great the next 12 hours. We were in the hotel last night. We'll be in the hotel tonight. Nobody will be in their rooms when the main part of the storm is hitting. We're going to have everybody downstairs. We're going to watch a movie as a team and kind of just hang out and relax."
