2019 MGN Season Preview

By Adam Martinez

The 2019 edition of the MeanGreenNation.com season preview has a breakdown of all the groups, players, and opponents of this year's program. Keep it as a companion guide to sound smart and cool.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Martinez
• Release date: Aug 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463930434

Adam Martinez

Adam Martinez is the founder and publisher of MeanGreenNation.com, a labor of love that follows the UNT football and basketball program (mostly). He has been on the internet for as long as he can remember and this is probably a bad thing.

Book preview

OVERVIEW

In high school, some wise senior sat next to me after a summer league basketball game and said that Junior year was the best year, because one could enjoy the benefits of being a senior classperson without the stress of graduation and all the next things that come with being a senior. She said being a senior seemed cool but was mostly not as fun as junior year.

That held true for me. Senior year was mostly me thinking about The Next Step and whatnot. The cool and fun things about being an upperclassman were old by the time I became a senior and I was very over it.

I think about that when it comes to Mason Fine’s final year. The athletic department is putting on a Heisman campaign and plastering Everything is Fine all over the place. Mason has had a hell of a career at North Texas and has been the face and voice of the program for all three seasons.

He puts tremendous pressure on himself already and I cannot imagine any of the Final Year things are going to make it easy.

Count me among those who think players play best when they are enjoying themselves. I wonder about the level of fun everyone will have this year.

The entire staff is gone — Graham Harrell is Fighting On in Southern California — can’t blame him! — And just about every other member of Seth Littrell’s staff is in their first year with this team. Mason Fine is carrying more than his share of the weight of leading this talented offense.

The quick preview is this: North Texas returns loads of talent and the best QB in the league, but has questions on the defensive side where nearly everyone who contributed is gone.

That is quite the problem.

Seth Littrell and Tony Reffett pulled together a surprisingly adept defense led by departed linebackers EJ Ejiya and Brandon Garner, and supported by departed Nate Brooks and Kemon Hall. Last year’s preview suggested that the defense had some tools but would require some radical improvement to compete. Well, that happened, incredibly.

Mason Fine and company were the second-best unit for large parts of games. That is curious but true. The counting stats suggest a powerful offense that was statistically better than the record-setting version of 2017, but we close observers saw the weaknesses in games against Tech, UAB, ODU, and Utah State.

The offense would go cold, the play-calling was questionable, and injuries challenged the depth of the strongest unit on the squad.

North Texas had both Tech and UAB beat and lost. They blew a huge lead against both and then later in the year they did the same against ODU. The Utah State game, in which Mason Fine was injured and pulled from the game, was the only one in which NT looked clearly second-best all season. In fact, NT was in some Alabama company in the number of plays it spent not trailing.

Last season was a sneaky remarkable season that ended with four