North Texas should already be a G5 titan, and Eric Morris knows it

Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time. TERSE rankings were updated yesterday following the release of new SP+ returning production, but this series will only use the updated rankings starting with the next post, as the update would lead to a different team filling this spot.

In 2021, Conference USA played host to two of the greatest comebacks in college football history. Old Dominion, which had skipped the previous season during COVID-19, entered having not won an FBS game since they defeated North Texas in early November 2018. The rust showed as they started 1-6, only beating Hampton and losing by scores of 42-10, 45-17, and 43-20.

But in their last game of October, the Monarchs snapped a losing streak of over a thousand days against FBS competition, stunning Louisiana Tech with two field goals in the final two minutes to win 23-20. They didn’t stop there—ODU dealt with moribund FIU and FAU, shocked capable Middle Tennessee, and won a shootout over Charlotte to complete a miraculous run that carried them into bowl season. They lost to Tulsa, but they still became the third team ever¹ to turn a 1-6 or worse start into a bowl bid.

The Monarchs had to settle for third because, just an hour before they rocked the 49ers in the Oyster Bowl, another team from the very same conference had accomplished almost exactly the same feat. Funnily enough, it was North Texas, the team that had been ODU’s most recent FBS victory for over three years before their five-game winning streak. The Mean Green opened their FBS slate with a 35-12 loss to rival SMU over in Dallas, then returned to Denton and were run off their own field by UAB, 40-6. Four more losses put them, too, in a 1-6 hole to start the season.

The way things turned around was largely emblematic of the program’s history under Seth Littrell, then in his sixth season. Like Old Dominion, they won five straight to pull off a shocking bowl bid, but like Old Dominion, they did so against a largely uninspiring home stretch. 4-8 Rice, 3-9 Southern Miss, a 7-6 UTEP in complete freefall, and 1-11 FIU are not the most impressive of wins. Taking down theretofore-undefeated UTSA in a 45-23 blowout at home is another matter, but the Roadrunners were probably at least a little checked out after beating UAB to clinch the division in Week 12. Whatever positive momentum North Texas gained from their one impressive win was squandered in the one-off Frisco Football Classic, which they never led and lost 27-14 to Miami-Ohio.

So: painfully ugly losses, wins that should always be free when they were needed most, and a thin veneer of good vibes and excitement that was just enough to keep Littrell in his seat. That’s how most of his seasons went, and as fun as 2021 and 2022 (when he went 1-4 out of conference but somehow made the C-USA title game, losing 48-27) were on the surface, North Texas was fed up with the Seth Littrell experience. This is a team with a nine-win ceiling despite frequent success, thriving local football, and a strong financial commitment by G5 standards (even if that buy-in has slipped a bit lately). Two days after that championship loss, they moved on.

When you move on from a coach like Littrell, you’re obviously hoping to create positive momentum for a program that’s currently in a fairly listless place. To that end, Eric Morris seems like a natural choice. He’s got local ties—more important for a coach in the Lone Star State than anywhere else—and invigorated the nascent Incarnate Word program in a four-year stint, taking them to their first playoff appearances, conference titles, and a ranked finish in his final season. A year as WSU’s offensive coordinator may have made his name a little harder to recall, but he was one of the best unclaimed HC options in the 2022 cycle, and now we’ll get a chance to see what he can do at the helm of an FBS program.

Notably, Morris made his name in part by engineering an immediate turnaround at UIW—the Cardinals went 1-10 the year before he arrived and gave up 49 or more points to a majority of their opponents. Under his watch, they immediately made the playoffs in year one, and while their ascent wasn’t entirely linear, they seem to have left the depths of the Southland behind for good. In other words, if you had one of the worst programs in the nation, Morris would probably be a good guy to bring on board.

That’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about this hire, as North Texas was one of the better Group of 5 teams last year. They ditched Littrell for good reasons, not least of which was the fact that 7-7 was pretty clearly his ceiling without lucking into generational G5 talent again, but he left a foundation in Denton. Given that UNT’s peers in C-USA recently saw lightspeed turnarounds from the likes of Jeff Traylor (4-8 to 12-2 in two years), Bill Clark (no team to 11-3 in two years), and Lane Kiffin (3-9 to 11-3 in one year), a quick leap to the top of the American is very feasible.

Are the Mean Green a conference title contender in Morris’s first season? Sure, why not? They are a defending division champion, after all, and while the blowout loss they suffered in the championship game was disheartening, it’s far from a hard ceiling on their immediate capabilities, considering they took UTSA down to the wire earlier in 2022. The returns from last year are pretty solid, and while the conference landscape is tougher, it’s not that much tougher. Aside from the Roadrunners, the only really excellent team in the AAC is Tulane, which is a bit of a wildcard considering how much they overshot even retrospective projections by last season. North Texas is hardly the best-positioned team in the conference to make major gains, but…well, with Morris at the helm, it’s a possibility.

Expectations should be set lower than that, but honestly, probably not much lower. The Mean Green have the pieces to succeed and don’t have the most daunting competition around them, which is how it’s been for well over a decade. Bridging the gap between potential and reality is Morris’s job, and it’s reasonable to look for results quickly, given how close this program has been for so long. The pressure is on; now it’s up to Morris to take the next step and put North Texas where it should have always been.

The Last Five Years

It’s easy for a coach like Littrell to reach the point of becoming an institution, not actually doing anything particularly positive but never conclusively proving that the program needs to move on. (Middle Tennessee has been stuck in this limbo with Rick Stockstill for, what, a decade at this point?) North Texas nipped that in the bud, looking instead for Littrell to prove something positive, not to avoid proving something negative. He continued to muddle along in the middle of C-USA, and ultimately that wasn’t enough. The firing might look a bit odd on paper, but I think it’s fair to say UNT had good reason to be aggressive.

2022 and 2023

Austin Aune dropped a miserable 2021 season (6.7 Y/A, 9 TD, 9 INT) smack-dab in the middle of his UNT career, but he bookended it with brilliant performances in 2020 (8.9 Y/A, 13 TD, 4 INT) and 2022 (8.6 Y/A, 33 TD, 15 INT). Passing was the biggest positive hallmark of the Littrell era, and as the coach who helped Cameron Ward become a premier FCS passer in his last season at UIW, the hope is that Morris will continue that tradition. The defense is more of a work in progress, installing a 3-3-5 scheme under longtime P5 position coach Matt Caponi. All things considered, though, the outlook is pretty good for all the off-field turmoil UNT has gone through lately, with major staff overhauls in several consecutive seasons.

ULM transfer Chandler Rogers is in position to take the reins under center, hoping to build on two seasons that look pretty great by the Warhawks’ standards (7.4 Y/A, 24 TD, 10 INT). That being said, Jace Ruder has made a surprising push for the job after a lackluster first season in Denton, and Morris has other options in the QB room worth considering as well. The Mean Green feel good about their offensive line, even if a top running back hasn’t emerged from a quietly very talented rushing corps. If anything holds them back, it’ll be a lack of physicality in the defense, where the front seven lacks size and the secondary is still searching for cohesion.

The Next Five Years

We’re a little over halfway through the 2023 previews now—this post marks the 13th of what will hopefully be 24 articles, though a late-offseason switch is always a possibility. After a one-week break (don’t worry, there’s something else coming out on Thursday!), we’ll get back into it with Nebraska on June 10.

That post will mark a shift in the broader style of these previews, and I think this is a good place to address it, because North Texas really exists somewhere between the two halves of the series. The teams that still lie ahead are mostly in the Power 5 and typically have a lot to build on, often in the very immediate future. By contrast, most of the programs we’ve already looked at are in the Group of 5 and still feel like they’re a long way from where they hope to be.

The Mean Green have a foot in both worlds, which is what makes this job so interesting. They were surprisingly solid last year, and on paper they could be an immediate contender for the AAC Championship Game if Tulane and UTSA don’t run away with both bids—but they also have a lot to figure out and many of the losses that typically come with an HC switch. They’re solidly in the lower ranks of FBS, having only recently left the worst conference in the G5—but they’re joining the best, and if they capitalized on their potential they’d certainly be a P5 candidate in the next realignment cycle. Morris arrives at the perfect time to tip the scales and pivot North Texas into the perennial conference leader they clearly could and should be, and with the foundation already mostly in place, there’s no time to lose.

1. I am almost certain this is true, having looked through all the teams that bowled with six losses, but I surprisingly couldn’t find any sources confirming it. The first team to do this was 2016 Miami-Ohio, which somehow went from 0-6 to 6-6; they also lost their bowl.