Start of Summer 2026
Summer is for doing
It has been a few months since we reckoned with the greatest football season in North Texas history and the knowledge that the main contributors will now attempt to do the same kind of footballing in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Forgetting is human, and it is good for us. I want to remember the good times, and forget the bad, even if the bad is yet to come.
Spring is about hope, and Summer is about doing. MGN has spent the last four years in the great American midwest and possess a new understanding of the kinds of summer that people have written wistfully about. For a native Texan, summer is about vacations and being out-of-school but my overriding memory of summers in the Lone Star State is doing whatever I was doing while avoiding the wrath of Sol.
I must admit that while walking with the family in 80-degree weather, I checked the South Texas temps to get an idea of what we will encounter in just a week — 93°. I will miss the middle west, folks. It’s green and pleasant.
But I am a Texan and I am very much looking forward to being back in my home state once again. I can talk football about real teams and not have to care about the Chiefs, or the Mizzou Tigers (fake team), or bandwagon SEC people.
Meanwhile, our head coach is trying to build a new squad, a new project on the success of the old. The old coach had success relative to the previous coaches, but honestly boys, I want more. I want more trophies. I want league titles — not league title game losses. College football is a full-on minor league and everyone is asking for a larger share of our shrinking wallets and we ask ourselves if it is worth it.
That is what summer has always been about — the toil, the investment, the effort. In the fall you do the reaping. On some October day you will either think “I’m glad I invested so much time, effort, and money in June” or “I should have done more.”
Summer is for doing.
The squad will be getting better over the summer. The coaches have time to prepare for the opponents. We have time to kick in a few more dollars.
We have all lamented some aspect of the changing nature of college sports in recent years. NIL, or realignment, or the transfer portal. With enough small changes over time, a thing can become unrecognizable. No one has an obligation to continue to support a thing. Tastes, interests, and circumstances all factor in. Whereas college sports was a cheap, localized expression of youth and passion, it is big and getting-bigger business and increasingly professionalized every day. Quirky passion has been targeted for exploitation. Tithing to the church of fandom has turned into an obligatory tax.
You sing ‘North Texas we love’ and you should show that love by meeting the President’s giving challenge and the AD’s giving challenge and The Coach’s giving challenge, and your season ticket prices went up, and the star QB wants a raise or he’ll leave for up the road and your coach wants a raise and new shirts. Don’t you want to compete?
It doesn’t seem worth it. Come the first challenges of the season, we’ll get a lot of people demanding better. So what feeling from last campaign should we carry forward to make it feel worth it? The loss to Tulane? The loss of the entire squad? The example of Tulane getting bullied by Ole Miss in Oxford?
Maybe it will when defending national champion Indiana is up 50-0.
Is that too pessimistic? What is a realistic performance? Perhaps that should be the goal. Perhaps that should be the guide for the donors paying, the players lifting, the staff grinding. All of college football is chasing Indiana, but North Texas gets the first crack at them in the new season. What better way to take the measure of the program than against he very best right after they won the whole thing?
Now is the time.
Let us make use of the summer time.