North Texas faces chaos as Morris departs mid-season. Should coaches stay or go, jeopardizing historic runs and player futures?
With the way the college football calendar stands at present, there’s just no good timing when it comes to the head coach carousel, and North Texas Mean Green fans learned that the hard way Tuesday night when it broke that head coach Eric Morris is taking the opening with the Oklahoma State Cowboys. The intent is for him to coach out the rest of the season, which could include an American Conference Championship appearance with a win over the Temple Owls and a potential College Football Playoff berth with a conference title.
Even if the players can get their heads back in this season and drown this chaos out, is this odd state of purgatory worth it? Not to mention, some players may now elect to sit out and better their future. Some may have plans to follow their head coach to the Big 12. The Mean Green run the risk of a fox in the hen house by keeping Morris and his staff, presumably who will follow him in part, on through this final stretch. If nothing else, it’s incredibly jarring and shows the broken state of college football when Cowboys recruits are tweeting about accepting offers from Morris while he’s in game prep with North Texas to beat the Owls.
The American Conference Championship has been marred by potential head coach departures the last two seasons – pertaining to the Tulane Green Wave, the Mean Green’s presumed opponent in the title matchup should they both win out. When former Green Wave head coach Willie Fritz took the Big 12 job with the Houston Cougars, it became clear that recruiting for the Cougars was being done in the Tulane building, and the former staff was quickly ushered out. And that was after the championship game.
Now, there’s no real solution that applies as a blanket for each situation. Perhaps a head coach in this situation might choose to depart. Does the interim head coach plan to leave to follow? If so, does that fix things at all? It’s hard to imagine that an entirely new staff could come in and implement a game plan with no time to do so.
Even weirder, the timing of all of this no longer is tied to the massive implications of the transfer portal opening, which previously began on Dec. 12. That’s now been moved back to Jan. 2. Unfortunately, the high school early signing period was left in its original spot of Dec. 3-5, effectively offsetting the benefits of moving the portal window.
Is the state of college football really being held to the decisions of high schoolers who are merely signing a letter of intent with plenty of time to be flipped? Is the derailing of successful seasons for particularly Group of Five programs less important than getting 18-year-old recruits on campus for early enrollment who may not even see the field their first season?
The obvious answer seems to be to move that early signing period and give the teams with players actually in collegiate football a fighting chance at finishing their season the right way.
The Mean Green are in the midst of a historic season with a school-best 10-1 record. Instead of celebrating their final season finish and potential first appearance in the American Conference Championship – of which a win assuredly sends them to the CFP with a ranked win over likely Tulane – the fan base is in understandable disarray. Worse, they’re being told to suck it up and accept the state of things. That just can’t be in the spirit of college football. Neither is a sitting head coach sending out recruiting offers for his future place of employment in the final week of the regular season.
If North Texas thinks Morris gives them the best shot at a CFP berth, then by all means, keep him on. But it risks tampering and distractions torpedoing all this season has built.