Head Coach: Eric Morris is entering his 3rd season as the head coach of the Mean Green with an 11-14 record. He helped the Mean Green navigate the move up to the AAC from CUSA with good success but it hasn’t been easy. He’s built the foundation for North Texas now, and is looking to make a strong step forward this year.
Program Outlook: North Texas is a program that doesn’t have much winning history. The Mean Green only have 3 bowl wins in program history, the 1946 Optimist Bowl over Pacific, 2002 New Orleans Bowl over Cincinnati and the 2013 Heart of Dallas Bowl over UNLV. They also happen to be located in Denton, TX which is just north of the DFW area, it’s absolutely prime recruiting territory which makes it strange that they haven’t seen better success. It’s clear this program has lots of potential, they dominated the Sun Belt under Darrell Dickey in the early 2000s, now we are waiting on the Mean Green to go on a run like that again.
How does the 2025 Roster look?: Retaining talent has been a struggle for North Texas and this year they rank 82nd in the country returning 51% of their production per Punt and Rally’s returning production rankings. Despite this, at a minimum North Texas will be extremely fun. Their games in recent years have been wild because they can go up and down the field on offense but don’t necessarily get stops. Expect the offense to be fun again. They have two very exciting QB options in bowl star Drew Mestemaker and a QB I like a lot in Reese Poffenbarger who took Albany on a Cinderella run to the semifinals of the FCS playoffs in 2023 and was set to be the starter at Miami FL until Cam Ward came in late. North Texas and Sam Houston went to war against each other this offseason, RB Shane Porter went to Sam Houston but in exchange North Texas managed to grab WR Simeon Evans from the Bearkats, Evans will lead a pretty good group there. If there’s one concern for the offense it will be the turnover on the offensive line. The Mean Green entered this offseason needing to work on just about everything defensively and they attacked the portal hard to address it bringing in 22 transfers on this side of the ball alone. This includes 4 starters from a pretty good Sam Houston defense from last year, a player on each level of the ball. I like that strategy because you get a tone setter in each room.
Screenshot from FBSchedules.com
2025 Schedule Thoughts: The Mean Green have a manageable schedule, they get 3 non-conference home games which is nice. Their non-conference schedule is headlined by an exciting home game against Washington State, they also host South Alabama and Lamar is their FCS foe, the Cardinals are coming off back to back winning seasons. North Texas’s only road game is to Kalamazoo to play Western Michigan who could be one of the better teams in the MAC. Their conference schedule includes 4 contenders and 4 rebuilding teams as most AAC programs seem to have, it’s very front loaded with most of their toughest tests earlier in the conference slate. The biggest positive is that the Mean Green get 3 of the 4 contenders at home but the flip side will be 3 of 4 rebuilding programs on the road. Overall there’s enough here for the Mean Green to get to a winning record, if these transfers get the defense going the Mean Green can dream of even more.
Final Thoughts: North Texas finds themselves in a solid middle ground currently. Last year showed they are better than a lot of programs in the conference but they were a step below the true contenders. As mentioned above, defense will be a key to closing the gap, but another way to get closer would be simply finishing drives. North Texas struggled on 3rd downs only converting 37% of them, they failed to score on 25% of their RedZone trips and turned the ball over far too often. These hidden misses can really help them close the gap to the best teams in the AAC. I can see this team finishing anywhere from barely bowl eligible to being in the thick of the AAC race.
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