TLDR: North Texas heads to San Marcos looking to make it two straight under a new coaching staff, while Texas State is still hunting its first win in a brutal opening stretch.
Neal Brown's first season at North Texas started with a gut-punch and a statement. The Mean Green opened by getting run off the field 52-16 by a No. 6 Indiana team that came in riding a 17-game winning streak, then flipped the script at home, throttling UNLV 44-6 behind Tayven Jackson's arm and legs and Jahiem White's 124 yards on the ground. Texas State, in its first season in the rebuilt Pac-12, is still looking for its first win of any kind.
North Texas enters 1-1 after a blowout loss to a ranked Indiana team and a dominant bounce-back win over UNLV, while Texas State is 0-2 in its first Pac-12 season, most painfully having blown a second-half lead in a last-second loss to UTSA. The board favors the Mean Green across the board, and the case for that leans heavily on a North Texas defense that just forced four turnovers against a Texas State unit that couldn't close out a winnable game.
+Brad Jackson regarded as a top non-power-four arm
+Led 17-7 at halftime against UTSA before collapsing
+Home crowd at UFCU Stadium
−0-2 start in first Pac-12 season
−Blew a 10-point second-half lead in a last-second loss
−Defense has allowed 90 points across two games
The Bobcats' two losses tell different stories. Getting run over 59-7 by a top-5 Texas team was expected. Blowing a 17-7 halftime lead to UTSA, capped by a go-ahead 25-yard touchdown with 14 seconds left, was not — that's a defense that had a game won and let it slip in the fourth quarter. Quarterback Brad Jackson has flashed the kind of arm that made him one of the more respected non-power-four passers in the country, but he's had almost no cushion to work with behind him.
North Texas' defense, under first-year coordinator Matt Powledge, looked like an entirely different unit against UNLV — four takeaways forced, zero touchdowns allowed, the Rebels' first shutout of the end zone in years. If that carries over even partially against a Texas State offense that's been generous with the football late in games, this one could get away from the Bobcats early.
San Marcos should be warm and dry Saturday, with clear skies and light wind — nothing that slows either offense down. Both teams have had extra motivation to clean up mistakes: North Texas coughed up a pick in a game defined by cramps and Texas field temperatures pushing past 150 degrees, while Texas State's fourth-quarter defensive letdown against UTSA is the kind of thing a staff spends a bye-less week correcting fast.
Both programs are still figuring out who they are this early in the season, but one team showed real teeth in its most recent outing and the other watched a winnable game slip through its hands in the final seconds. That gap is the whole story here.
