100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

After the 1998 Liberty Bowl, a Tulane player held up a small sign. It read “NATIONAL CHAMPS.”

Linebacker Brian Timmons said what the whole team was thinking.

“We’re 12-0,” Timmons told the Associated Press. “They can’t take that away from us. We feel in our hearts we are the true national champions.”

The Green Wave had just beaten BYU 41-27 to finish the season 12-0. They were one of two undefeated Division I-A teams in the country. The other was Tennessee, which would play Florida State for the national championship four days later.

Tulane played in Memphis on New Year’s Eve. Tennessee played in Tempe on January 4.

Same record. Different conference. Different destination.

Before King

Before Tommy Bowden arrived in 1997, Tulane had won 11 games in five years. The program hadn’t posted a winning season in more than 15 years. The Green Wave was a private school in New Orleans where football was something that happened between tailgates.

Bowden changed the culture immediately. His 1997 team went 7-4 and returned 10 offensive starters for 1998, including a quarterback who was about to rewrite the school record book.

Shaun King

Shaun King entered 1998 as the Conference USA offensive player of the year. He left it as the holder of the NCAA Division I-A single-season pass efficiency record.

King completed 68 percent of his passes for 3,232 yards and 36 touchdowns against six interceptions in the regular season. His passer rating of 183.3 broke Danny Wuerffel’s record of 178.4, set at Florida in 1995. King became the first I-A player in history to pass for 3,000 yards and rush for more than 500 in an 11-game season.

He did most of it with a broken left wrist, suffered in Week 3 against Navy. It was his non-throwing hand. He never missed a start.

With King running Rich Rodriguez’s hurry-up offense, Tulane averaged 45.4 points per game — second nationally — and 507.1 yards of total offense. The Green Wave scored 40 or more points in nine games, seven of them consecutive to end the regular season.

The Season

Tulane opened 2-0 for the first time in 23 years with wins at Cincinnati (52-34) and at SMU (31-21). King threw for 352 yards against SMU and connected with JaJuan Dawson on a school-record 94-yard touchdown.

The Green Wave trailed for the first time in Week 3 against Navy. King answered with three touchdown passes and a rushing score. He also broke his wrist. Tulane won 42-24.

The next week, Tulane beat defending C-USA champion Southern Miss 21-7. The defense forced six turnovers. Alphonso Roundtree returned an interception 59 yards for a touchdown. King played through the broken wrist. Backup Jeff Curtis took snaps from under center so King could play in the shotgun.

Louisville tested them. Chris Redman threw for 477 yards. King threw for 273 with three touchdowns and no interceptions. With 1:06 left and Tulane up six, Brad Palazzo missed a 46-yard field goal that would have sealed it. Redman drove to the Tulane three-yard line. On the final play, Tim Carter broke up the pass in the end zone. Tulane survived 28-22.

The blowouts followed. 52-24 at Rutgers. 72-20 over Southwestern Louisiana — 706 yards of total offense, the most by a Tulane team in 61 years. 41-31 at Memphis. 49-35 at Army, where King threw for over 300 yards and rushed for more than 100 in the same game — a first in school history — and the win clinched a share of the C-USA title. 48-20 over Houston to clinch it outright, with King completing a school-record 18 consecutive passes. 63-30 over Louisiana Tech to finish 11-0.

It was Tulane’s first conference championship since winning the SEC in 1949. The Green Wave had been a charter member of the SEC from 1933 to 1966.

The Snub

The BCS was new in 1998 — its first year replacing the Bowl Alliance. The formula was supposed to remove human bias from the selection process.

Tulane finished 10th in the final BCS standings. The top six earned spots in BCS bowl games. The Conference USA schedule that produced a perfect record also produced a strength-of-schedule rating the computers refused to reward. There was no path to a national championship for a team in the wrong conference.

The Green Wave accepted a bid to the Liberty Bowl.

The Statement

Bowden wasn’t there. He had resigned December 2 to take the Clemson job. Rodriguez followed him. Chris Scelfo, hired from Georgia a week later, coached the bowl game with five assistants who were about to leave for Clemson.

King didn’t care who was on the sideline.

“Coach Bowden never played a game for us,” King told the AP. “Now coach Scelfo has never played. The team was still the same. The players are still the same. We took that to heart and said we can do it without coach Bowden.”

Against BYU’s fifth-ranked defense, Tulane rolled up 528 yards. King went 23-of-38 for 276 yards and two touchdowns. He rushed 16 times for 109 yards and scored on the ground. Cornerback Michael Jordan intercepted a pass and returned it 79 yards for a touchdown — the longest interception return in Liberty Bowl history.

Tulane 41, BYU 27. The Green Wave’s first bowl victory since 1970.

“Hopefully, we answered some of our doubters,” King said. “Any time you go undefeated, you should be ranked in the top five.”

He was direct about the team that was about to play for the title Tulane was denied.

“I’d love to play Tennessee, and I think it would be a good game,” King said.

BYU coach LaVell Edwards, whose program had been shut out of the Bowl Alliance two years earlier despite going 14-1, recognized what Tulane accomplished.

“The fact is they’re undefeated, one of only two teams that have accomplished that,” Edwards said. “It’s no small task to go undefeated, and they did it. You just have to give them credit.”

The Record

Tulane finished seventh in both the AP and coaches’ polls — its highest ranking since 1939. Tennessee beat Florida State 23-16 in the Fiesta Bowl and claimed the national championship. The Volunteers and the Green Wave finished as the only undefeated teams in Division I-A.

King was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the second round of the 1999 NFL Draft. Rodriguez eventually became head coach at West Virginia and Michigan. The 1998 staff coached its way out of Conference USA and into the upper tier of college football — built on a season spent at Tulane.

The 1998 Green Wave remain the only undefeated team in Tulane football history. Twelve wins. A conference championship. A bowl victory. An NCAA record. And a postseason snub that would become a template — the same argument UCF would make 20 years later, the same frustration that eventually forced the expansion of the College Football Playoff.

The BCS never gave them a shot. Timmons had the last word.

“They can’t take that away from us.”

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