Its coach is gone, and the goal for North Texas now is to become Houston
North Texas is going through what the University of Houston did when the Cougars were once the boilin’ hot team from a little Group of Five conference.
The Houston people tried everything in their power to keep head coach Tom Herman in 2016, but it wasn’t about the money. Houston could offer Herman a lot of money. Houston, then a member of the American Athletic Conference, could not offer the stage.
Nine years later, thanks to dramatic rules changes in NCAA sports, UNT is now tasked to try to keep not only the coach but the players from leaving, too. Good luck. For everybody. The Mean Green is 10-1, No. 21 in the latest AP Top 25 poll, and on track to reach the American Athletic Conference title game.
As expected, UNT could not keep third-year coach Eric Morris, who agreed on Tuesday to become the next head coach at Oklahoma State, but will remain at UNT through the end of its season, which potentially includes the College Football Playoff.
“On behalf of the University of North Texas, I want to express our deep gratitude to Eric for everything he has done for Mean Green Football over the past three seasons,” UNT athletic director Jared Mosley said in a statement. “He took over at one of the most chaotic times in college athletics and brought great success on the field, including two bowl-eligible seasons and the program’s first national ranking in over six decades, while our student-athletes excelled in the classroom and in the Denton community.”
If UNT can win its next two games, it will be either the G5 playoff team, or it will just miss it. It will be one of the three teams that “got screwed” by the system.
Either way, this is the most memorable season for its football team in the modern era, and it has established what is possible at UNT.
North Texas’ long-range goal
Despite every effort to entice Morris to stay, as well as quarterback Drew Mestemaker, running back Caleb Hawkins and left tackle Braydon Nelson, there is only so much UNT can do, or offer. Most, and maybe all, of them will be elsewhere by January.
Setting a goal of retaining Morris and Mestemaker is noble, and even if it doesn’t work, there is a bigger objective. What UNT can do is continue to build something that can repeat these types of successful seasons with the idea of pulling a Houston and elevating into a different conference. How college football, and the model of Power Four athletics, looks today will be different in the next five years.
Can UNT score an invite to the Big 12, or a higher-profile league? The easy answer is, “No way in heaven, hell or in between.”
If you are UNT, you have to believe it’s possible. It happened for Utah, TCU, Cincinnati, Central Florida, Louisville, SMU and Houston.
At various points years ago, all of those institutions fed athletic departments with the hopes of playing the high-profile games on ESPN, ABC or Fox that attracted eyeballs. A lot of money had to be spent, and a lot of winning had to be achieved, but it did happen.
If you are North Texas president Harrison Keller, Mosley and the university’s board, the job is to ignore the odds and the percentages and try like hell to make it.
Houston couldn’t keep its coach, but five years after Herman left for Texas, the Cougars were invited to join the Big 12.
The mean monster for the Mean Green
On Tuesday at his weekly press conference, TCU coach Sonny Dykes said that college football is becoming like Major League Baseball.
“It’s the haves and the have-nots,” he said.
More like Major and minor league baseball.
Even teams that play in the ACC and Big 12 are losing players to the SEC and Big Ten. The revenue, and overall money, discrepancy between TheBigSEC10 and the rest of college sports has created a playing field that looks like it was designed by a 7.8 Richter scale earthquake.
As a member of the AAC, North Texas’ media rights revenues don’t compare to schools that play in the Power Four. An AAC school receives about $7 million each year from media rights. That’s not nothing.
A Big 12 school receives about $32 million each year, while a Big Ten or SEC university takes in just a little more than double that amount in media rights revenue. This doesn’t include ticket sales, merchandising, etc.
Compounding this issue for not just North Texas but all of college football is a calendar that makes it all a mess. Thanks to the playoff, college football is now a two-semester sport, which makes the transfer portal, and hiring new coaches, a labyrinth of contradictions, and terrible timing.
North Texas and Ole Miss are enjoying historic seasons, and after the subject of their playoff chances, the prevailing topic has been whether their head coach is currently talking to other schools about their vacancies.
Morris did what he had to do for himself, as now so do the players.
For a program like North Texas that for decades aspired to be where it is right now, these are welcomed challenges. It was wonderful to think Morris would remain in Denton in 2026, but the reality of college football says otherwise.
It doesn’t mean that one day North Texas can’t be Houston.
This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 4:24 PM.
