Mason Fine and The NT Record Book

The 2016 season was nothing like the offense that we had been promised, but 2017 is shaping up to be that and maybe a bit more. North Texas leads the conference in a handful of categories — scoring (37.8), total offense (503.5), yards per play (7.27), long scrimmage plays (72 10+yard plays) — and Mason Fine is much improved over last year. Fine is 78/123 (68.4%) for 1076 or 8.7 ypa 9 TDs against 3 INTs. This roughly projects to the following:

234 / 370 3228 yards 27 TDs 9 INTs

That is roughly similar to what this blog projected for a good season in this offense with Alec Morris. The thinking was that the offense was going to have peaks and valleys but that the pass game would be decent. Here is that prediction:

300 / 490, 3500 yards, 28 TDS 9 INTs.

That would be a nice, solid Air Raid season for a SR QB. Nothing eye-popping but good-to-great numbers.

Mason Fine is not far off from that. In fact Fine is not too far off from another CUSA great who had an excellent transformation from freshman to sophomore:

For a SR QB those would be good-to-great numbers. For a true sophomore those would be really good numbers — especially for NT. Once again in case you did not go back and read the old post, a 3200 yard season would put Fine in the top 10 career pass yardage leaders here at NT. Speaking of career numbers, he is at 2648 as of this writing. Another 400+ performance would put him just over Ken Washington’s 3040 for his career.

NT Career Passing Yards

1. Mitch Maher — 1991-94 — 8,519
2. Derek Thompson — 2009-13 — 7,447
3. Steve Ramsey — 1967-69 — 7,076
4. Scott Davis — 1987-90 — 6,923
5. Scott Hall — 2000-04 — 5,975
6. Giovanni Vizza — 2007-08 — 5,146
7. Jason Mills — 1994-97 — 3,981
8. Vidal Carlin — 1965-66 — 3,233
9. Riley Dodge — 2008-10 — 3,187
10. Ken Washington — 1974-77 — 3,040

The season is still young, but four games gives us a good enough idea of what to expect. While we do not want to get carried away with what could be we also do not want to miss understanding the implications of this relatively historic season.