Green Wave

New Orleans is not a college-football town in the SEC sense. The Green Wave name itself dates only to 1920; before that the teams simply wore olive green and sky blue and answered to whatever a sportswriter felt like calling them that week.

The high point sits in 1931, a claimed national championship that came inside a run of four Southern Conference titles in seven seasons (1925, 1929, 1930, 1931). Tulane moved into the Southeastern Conference in 1933 and won it three times, in 1934, 1939 and 1949.

Nothing captures that unsettled history like the search for a home ground. Tulane has played its games at six different venues since 1893, including a long stint at the Louisiana Superdome from 1975 to 2013 — sharing the city's showcase stadium rather than owning a stage of its own. Yulman Stadium, opened in 2014 on the university campus in Uptown New Orleans, ended that arrangement and gave the team a 30,000-seat ground it does not have to split with anyone.

The rivalry that matters most is with LSU, contested as the Battle for the Rag, a fixture that predates most of the conference realignment around it. Recent form has given the club its best modern argument for relevance: back-to-back American Athletic Conference titles in 2022 and 2025, either side of a Cotton Bowl Classic win in 2023, under Willie Fritz before Jon Sumrall took over the program in 2024.