It has been a few months since we reckoned with the greatest football season in North Texas history and the knowledge that the main contributors will now attempt to do the same kind of footballing in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Forgetting is human, and it is good for us. I want to remember the good times, and forget the bad, even if the bad is yet to come.

Spring is about hope, and Summer is about doing. MGN has spent the last four years in the great American midwest and possess a new understanding of the kinds of summer that people have written wistfully about. For a native Texan, summer is about vacations and being out-of-school but my overriding memory of summers in the Lone Star State is doing whatever I was doing while avoiding the wrath of Sol.

I must admit that while walking with the family in 80-degree weather, I checked the South Texas temps to get an idea of what we will encounter in just a week — 93°. I will miss the middle west, folks. It’s green and pleasant.

But I am a Texan and I am very much looking forward to being back in my home state once again. I can talk football about real teams and not have to care about the Chiefs, or the Mizzou Tigers (fake team), or bandwagon SEC people.

Meanwhile, our head coach is trying to build a new squad, a new project on the success of the old. The old coach had success relative to the previous coaches, but honestly boys, I want more. I want more trophies. I want league titles — not league title game losses. College football is a full-on minor league and everyone is asking for a larger share of our shrinking wallets and we ask ourselves if it is worth it.

That is what summer has always been about — the toil, the investment, the effort. In the fall you do the reaping. On some October day you will either think “I’m glad I invested so much time, effort, and money in June” or “I should have done more.”

Summer is for doing.

The squad will be getting better over the summer. The coaches have time to prepare for the opponents. We have time to kick in a few more dollars.

We have all lamented some aspect of the changing nature of college sports in recent years. NIL, or realignment, or the transfer portal. With enough small changes over time, a thing can become unrecognizable. No one has an obligation to continue to support a thing. Tastes, interests, and circumstances all factor in. Whereas college sports was a cheap, localized expression of youth and passion, it is big and getting-bigger business and increasingly professionalized every day. Quirky passion has been targeted for exploitation. Tithing to the church of fandom has turned into an obligatory tax.

You sing ‘North Texas we love’ and you should show that love by meeting the President’s giving challenge and the AD’s giving challenge and The Coach’s giving challenge, and your season ticket prices went up, and the star QB wants a raise or he’ll leave for up the road and your coach wants a raise and new shirts. Don’t you want to compete?

It doesn’t seem worth it. Come the first challenges of the season, we’ll get a lot of people demanding better. So what feeling from last campaign should we carry forward to make it feel worth it? The loss to Tulane? The loss of the entire squad? The example of Tulane getting bullied by Ole Miss in Oxford?

Maybe it will when defending national champion Indiana is up 50-0.

Is that too pessimistic? What is a realistic performance? Perhaps that should be the goal. Perhaps that should be the guide for the donors paying, the players lifting, the staff grinding. All of college football is chasing Indiana, but North Texas gets the first crack at them in the new season. What better way to take the measure of the program than against he very best right after they won the whole thing?

Now is the time.

Let us make use of the summer time.

There are two ways to frame North Texas’ season.

If you want to be harsh, you can say the Mean Green slightly underperformed.

If you want to be fair, the stronger case is that they mostly performed to expectation, and that expectation simply ended up disappointing people.

That distinction matters.

This was not a loaded roster that collapsed under pressure. …

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Apologies for the lack of posting here by your humble proprietor. As I mentioned elsewhere, MGN is in the process of relocating back to Texas and that involves a lot of preparation — for selling, for moving, for acquiring property and so on and so forth. All the spare time is accounted for, and then some.

I did find time to watch both Women’s games this…

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That’s why I love this time of year.

Conference tournaments are strange things. Teams get hot. Matchups f…

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The calendar has turned to March, the greatest time of the year.

This time of year always brings me a lot of joy. Lately one of my favorite moments has been hearing my son shooting baskets in his room yelling “Onions” after every made shot in honor of Bill Raftery. It makes me smile every single time. It is one of those small things that reminds you why …

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Well that was quite the week.

If North Texas wanted to stay in position for the American tournament they needed to protect home court against two solid teams in Tulane and FAU. What they got was a split. They picked up a win they probably should not have against FAU and dropped a game they absolutely should have closed against Tulane.

That Tulane loss was…

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You know I have not written one thing about this year’s team. No preview. No breakdown. Nothing. And honestly it has been hard to get excited about what we have watched.

It has not been pretty. It has been a frustrating cycle of inconsistent basketball. We have seen moments where you lean forward in your chair and think okay here we go. Then five minutes…

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First, a note about MGN’s posting schedule. My full intention was to get to these a little more quickly, but life has its way of disrupting plans, well laid or no. My real-life job has become quite demanding and I have given it due attention. I also still try to play rec-league stuff and well yesterday after a Thursday-Friday back-to-back of 10:30-9pm g…

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We had something like 10 inches of snow in a couple of days. I had no car, as my car was in the shop for routine maintenance when the auxiliary battery went out and caused the car to not be able to reverse. We learned this as they were calling us to get the car. This would not have been much of a deal except for the fact that we were snowed in.

It was n…

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It is your weekly open thread where you can do what you like. Forget not that you have the forum as well.

Links:

• Charlie Baker interviewed by SI.

• (Soccer)’s class appropriation problem.

• TDH Does Not Recommend Stranger Things — I was out on ST after the first season. I said at the time that the entire show’s premise was “hey remember this?” and I was hap…

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Over on the forum, we have a tracker and it is slightly ahead of the 247 sports one. There are trackers all over. Everyone is tracking.

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We asked for a close enough game so Je’Shawn Stevenson could have a shot to carry the squad. We got what we wanted, and also learned the lesson that if you need your main man to be a superhero to win, you won’t win a lot.

North Texas shot 9/20 from the free throw line, while USF made 27 of 36 (75%). USF had 19 second chance points, including a back-brea…

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Who is Ousmane Ndour? He’s a 6’9” Senagalese hooper who played in Spain’s second division. He averaged about 10-points and 5-rebounds per game in about 20-minutes per game. He was called “skilled” and has four years of eligibility, despite his experience and age (20 years old). Will he play four years at North Texas? Likely not, if he is even mildly goo…

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Being a part of Mean Green Nation is a choice. You do not need to root for North Texas, support the athletic programs, or anything you do not want to do. It is not an obligation in any sense other than cultural. Will your humbler MGN proprietor think less of you? Yes.

So your continued support for North Texas is possibly contingent on whether that means…

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That’s a big win. The final graphic said it was the highest NET win since the 2021 Purdue first rounder in the Tournament. Tulsa was ranked 38th in NET and had lost only once. North Texas gummed up the works, put the clamps on a high-scoring offense and sprinkled in some threes to win the game.

The defense was on-brand, but the threes and FTs down the s…

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In 2025, the American’s top two teams were Memphis and North Texas. They played a defensive slugfest in Memphis in early January, and Memphis won at home. We came away from that game thinking that UNT could do some things when the game was going our way, and couldn’t when Memphis created chaos.

In 2026, Memphis is one of the league’s top teams and they …

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North Texas has something like 30-plus portal entries. Some of these were just a means to an end — Morris taking his key guys to Oklahoma State — and some were reactionary — the depth chart seeing what is out there. We’ve already seen Jayden Becks reverse his decision to enter the portal. I imagine there is a range of circumstances and a range of enthus…

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We said on the show that the forum is for the people. Whereas Adam is a non-stop opinion haver, you don’t need my permission to fire off some hot sports opinions in the forum. But also here in the Open Thread, you may wax profound. You don’t even need to tell us about your Mean Green opinions. Have some HSOs about the colorized version of It’s A Wonderf…

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