Future of G5

Harry Minium of Pilot Online

(hat tip to GMG, which posted this twice)

There are big changes coming to Conference USA and most of the rest of the Group of Five, as the mid-major Football Bowl Subdivision leagues are known, that many league officials are understandably hesitant to embrace.

Sports teams used to draw the majority of their revenue from attendance, but for the last 30 years, it has been TV. That is a bubble that is near bursting, or didn’t you know? North Texas is in one of the best situations it has been in in decades. UTSA, Rice, UTEP, are all regional and about as close as anyone can get in a state this vast. I do not much care for combining the Sun Belt so much as acquiring Texas State as a conference mate. Regionalism is the wave, y’all.

247 NT Profile

247 Sports

The turning point for North Texas a year ago came at halftime against Rice in a Week 4 road contest. One week after Florida held the Mean Green to 57 yards total yards in a shutout loss, the Owls were up 17-0 deep in the second quarter. A 14-point surge made the game 17-14 at halftime, and Littrell told his team in the locker room: “We’re going to win it. We talk about adversity every day. This is the adversity I was talking about.”

This is a good profile but you can see the outlines of the Year 2 narrative taking shape. While I generally agree with author Chris Hummer’s point about the slight improvement in the passing game visible in the Bowl outing, we who watch a bit closer should remember that Alec Morris mostly took what was available, and there was plenty of meat left on the bone.

There is much work to do, and the four-game improvement is not guaranteed, no matter how iffy the conference is.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled viewing of the world ending.