🟢 Forgotten Power Friday: The 1998 Tulane Green Wave
The undefeated team nobody wanted to talk about.
Before Boise State’s Statue of Liberty, before UCF’s self-proclaimed national title, there was 1998 Tulane—a team that went 12-0, finished No. 7 in the AP Poll, and never got a whiff of a BCS bowl in the very first year of the BCS system.
The Green Wave were electric, efficient, and utterly ignored. But dig beneath the record and you’ll find one of the most fascinating “what could have been” stories in the modern history of college football.
🌊 How Did Tulane Go 12-0?
It starts with Tommy Bowden (yes, that Bowden) and his offensive coordinator—an up-and-coming Rich Rodriguez running a nascent version of the spread. The 1998 Tulane offense averaged:
45.4 points per game (No. 1 in the country)
507.7 yards per game
Scored 50+ points in 6 games
And they did it all behind quarterback Shaun King, who threw for 3,232 yards, rushed for another 633, and accounted for thirty-eight touchdowns. He became the first player in NCAA history to pass for over 3,000 and rush for over 500 in a season.
King wasn’t just a stat machine—he was surgical. Tulane committed just 8 turnovers all year, led the nation in fewest sacks allowed, and ranked No. 2 in total offense.
The defense wasn’t elite, but it didn’t need to be. With Rodriguez dialing up tempo before most teams had even thought of it, Tulane bludgeoned opponents in Conference USA. The average margin of victory? 26.3 points.
🧂 The BCS Snub
Despite finishing undefeated, Tulane was completely shut out of BCS consideration.
Why? A few reasons:
Strength of schedule: They didn’t play a single Power 5 opponent.
Conference USA wasn’t an automatic qualifier.
Preseason bias: They started the year unranked and never cracked the Top 6.
The brand-new BCS system, meant to create clarity, instead drew a line in the sand: if you weren’t in a power league, you didn’t matter.
That year, Tennessee (13-0) beat Florida State (11-2) for the national title in the Fiesta Bowl. Tulane? They beat BYU in the Liberty Bowl, 41-27, to finish 12-0—and still didn’t get a single first-place vote.
💥 What If They Had Stayed Together?
After the season, both Bowden and Rodriguez were gone—Bowden to Clemson, Rodriguez to Clemson briefly, then to his own head coaching journey that would shake the college football world.
Shaun King headed to the NFL, and Tulane returned to obscurity.
But imagine this:
What if Tulane had been allowed into the BCS?
What if Rich Rod had stayed and kept developing the spread in New Orleans?
What if the Group of Five had playoff access then?
You could argue that 1998 Tulane was the first real “BCS Buster”—they just never got the chance to bust anything.
📝 Legacy
Tulane wouldn’t finish ranked again until 2022. But that '98 team planted seeds:
Rodriguez’s offense influenced a generation of spread coaches
Shaun King remains one of the most underrated dual-threat QBs ever
And Tulane proved, long before Boise or UCF or Cincinnati, that the little guys could run the table too
They just needed a bigger table.