Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Bowl season begins with Mean Green defeat

Bowl season began yesterday evening, with North Texas and Southern Miss squaring off in the Wyndham New Orleans Bowl. Lori and I watched part of the game with other Houston-area UNT alumni at Noche restaurant on Montrose, but the game didn’t turn out to be very watchable. The Golden Eagles dominated the Mean Green 31-10; the score would have looked worse had North Texas not scored a touchdown on the last play of the game. This is UNT’s third loss in four consecutive New Orleans Bowl appearances; Darrell Dickey’s squad continues to be unable to win games out of conference.

To be fair to the Mean Green, they’ve had a rough season. Quarterback Andrew Smith was killed in a car crash shortly before the season started; Chronicle columnist John Lopez wrote a good article about the tragedy and local furniture mogul (and UNT alum) Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale’s response to it. The Mean Green then began the season with four straight losses. To their credit, however, they overcame these setbacks to dominate the Sun Belt conference for the fourth year in a row; they haven’t lost a conference game since 2001.

However, the Mean Green must find a way to begin winning out of conference; last night’s performance against a decent but not invincible Southern Miss team was simply unimpressive.

(Retroblogged on August 23, 2015.)

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