Jon Sumrall has Tulane rolling at 6-1 this season. And the betting markets have taken notice in a big way. The Green Wave head coach is now the favorite to land the LSU job at 3/2 odds following Brian Kelly’s firing. He’s apparently been paying attention to how another hot coaching name has handled similar speculation. Turns out, the Tulane HC is borrowing a page straight from Lane Kiffin’s playbook. 

Sumrall gave Aaron Torres a peek at his approach. “no distractions are going to come up with this football team.” He addressed the team and made it clear, “When things are going bad, there may be fans or people on like Twitter that are calling for me to get fired, right, and when things are going good, they may try to speculate like ‘Hey coach could go here, do that, do something else.'” The blueprint is pretty simple, really. Both coaches, Sumrall and Kiffin, have figured out that the best way to get through to players about ignoring job rumors is to make it about them.

In today’s college football landscape, NIL deals and the transfer portal have fundamentally changed how players approach their careers. So, it’s not just coaches fielding calls about bigger opportunities anymore. Players are getting hit up constantly, too. And that shared experience has become the perfect teaching moment.​ That’s why Jon Sumrall made his speech personal.

“Players deal with the same thing. Like, players now, they can they can probably appreciate this better now because there is player movement. There’s players getting paid.” He referenced losing players from last year’s roster and then drove home his point: “Some of y’all will be presented with decisions you have to make at the end of the year. Let’s make them at the freaking end of the year… Like, don’t give me anything about ‘my agent is telling me we should look at this transfer spot.'” The message was to deal with this stuff when the season’s over, not in the middle of it. Kiffin’s approach with his 7-1 Ole Miss squad sounds remarkably similar.

He addressed it with his team late in the week before their Oklahoma game. Reason? Specifically, because so many new players hadn’t experienced the annual coaching rumor mill yet. “This is a product of how you guys play is why they see the way that you play,” Kiffin told them, making sure they understood the speculation was actually a compliment to their performance. Then he brought it back to their reality.

“I think it’s easier for them nowadays because remember, basically the same thing happens to them. They have a good game. What happens? You know, our freshman receiver has a good game Saturday night, he’s got three calls from places telling him, ‘Hey, come here, we’ll give you more money.'” Kiffin noted that before the portal era, players would never have examples of this in their own lives, but now “they’re used to that now. It’s just kind of the world that they live in.” What’s striking is how both coaches have independently arrived at the exact same conclusion about managing this new reality.

They’ve recognized that the portal and NIL have actually given them a better way to communicate with their players about staying focused. Because the players are living through their own version of the same chaos. Sumrall’s 38-10 career record and Kiffin’s 50-18 mark at Ole Miss suggest the approach is working pretty well. With Sumrall sitting at the top of the LSU odds board and Kiffin not far behind, both coaches will probably get plenty more opportunities to refine this message before the season ends.​

Jon Sumrall shuts down job talk

The 43-year-old could’ve danced around the LSU question like most coaches do. But instead, he laid out exactly where his head’s at in pretty blunt terms. He made it clear that if all he wanted was a Power Four gig or a bigger paycheck, he wouldn’t be at Tulane right now. “I’ve had those opportunities,” he said. “Other people have offered me more money than I make here.” He’s actually happy where he is. “I love where I’m at, I love what I do. I love who I do it with,” Sumrall told Torres, adding that he couldn’t predict where he’d be 25 years from now but “wouldn’t be pissed” if he was still coaching in New Orleans.​

The way Jon Sumrall framed it shows he’s genuinely not thinking about what’s next. He told straight up that he loves everything about his job and New Orleans. He’s so locked in on the week-to-week grind that all the speculation just doesn’t register. “I’m so freaking micro-focused on going 1-0 every week that like all that speculation, I don’t even pay attention to it,” he said. Apparently, when people try to bring up the coaching rumors to him, his response is pretty direct: “Get away from me. Like, don’t even talk. Like I ain’t got no time for it.”

Now, does that mean Sumrall will never leave Tulane? Of course not. He’s 43 years old with a 38-10 record as an FBS head coach. He’s realistic about how this business works. But what it does mean is that right now, with his team sitting at 6-1 and in the mix for an American championship and potential CFP spot. The Tulane HC made it clear that he is not entertaining any what-if conversations about LSU or anywhere else.