We had Brady Keane, the sports editor for the North Texas Daily, write up a little bit about the North Texas football team. Keane, a senior at North Texas, gave us some insight on the new and improved Mean Green.
By Brady Keane
The last time North Texas and Iowa met, the Mean Green were a much different team.
That matchup came in 2015, when North Texas was still coached by Dan McCarney. The season finished as one of the worst in school history, and McCarney was fired just two weeks after North Texas lost, 62-16, to Iowa.
There is a little more excitement surrounding the program now. Second-year head coach Seth Littrell turned things around in a short period of time and immediately took the team to a bowl game last season barely a year removed from a dismal 1-11 2015 campaign.
Iowa fans may remember the Mean Green as a power football team that lined up and tried to run the ball out of a lot of I-formation sets two years ago. That is no longer the case. Littrell and offensive coordinator Graham Harrell have teamed up to bring a much more innovative system to Denton. North Texas has one of the most productive running backs, Jeffery Wilson, in all of Conference USA, and the Mean Green will get the ball in his hands a lot out of the shotgun. But the offense depends a lot on the arm of sophomore quarterback Mason Fine, who is coming off the best statistical performance of his career.
Fine threw for 424 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 54-32 loss to SMU, including a 72-yard bomb to former Notre Dame wide receiver Jalen Guyton. Guyton has emerged as one of the team’s top playmakers almost immediately after arriving from Trinity Valley Junior College, and he has a Power-5 caliber skills that could give any secondary some issues.
Defensively, the Mean Green entered the year with what was believed to be an extremely strong secondary unit. But that group has given up some big plays over the first two weeks of the season, and opponents average 287 yards through the air against North Texas. Part of that stems from the bloated numbers SMU receiver Courtland Sutton, a projected early round NFL pick, put up last week.
Against the run, the Mean Green have been fairly strong. This bodes well against an old-school team such as Iowa. North Texas is giving up an average of just 92 yards on the ground each week.
The Mean Green open as 21.5 underdogs this weekend, and they will need to take care of the football and get off the field on third down to have any chance of hanging in the game with the Hawkeyes. North Texas has allowed 28 points on turnovers in two games, and SMU converted 50 percent of its third downs against the Mean Green last week — those will be key points of emphasis for the team in Iowa City.