DENTON — North Texas head football coach Eric Morris declined to comment on the status of his program’s nonexistent early national signing day class Tuesday morning.
He did sign more than a dozen high schoolers — over a third of whom were previously committed to the Mean Green — to play for his next team, though, and simultaneously prepared his current one for one of the most important games in program history.
Restful nights of sleep, he said, have been few and far between.
“On a lot of different levels,” Morris said, “the calendar is totally jacked up right now.”
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The college football calendar has compressed early national signing day, the transfer portal’s opening and the start of the College Football Playoffs into a tumultuous one-month sprint and drawn the ire of administrators and coaches nationwide.
Friday’s American Conference championship game between No. 20 Tulane (10-2, 7-1) and No. 24 North Texas (11-1, 7-1) has become a poster child of college football’s chaos and will be manned by two head coaches who’ve already accepted jobs elsewhere. Morris (Oklahoma State) and Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall (Florida) will start their new gigs in a full-time capacity upon the conclusion of their respective program’s seasons.
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They’ve pulled double duty in the meantime at critical junctures for each of the four programs involved.
“I think if we’re going to hold student athletes accountable to preserving the integrity of the postseason — which is what the changes and legislation are designed to do — then coaches should be held accountable as well,” AC commissioner Pernetti said. “Otherwise it becomes very disruptive. The butt end of the stick, typically, is the student athletes.”
The current structure behooves programs to have a head coach in place before early national signing day (Dec. 3) and before the transfer portal opens (Jan. 2) to maximize their windows of opportunity. The matters were accelerated when 15 head coaches were fired across the country this season and an early priority was placed on premier candidates like Morris and Sumrall.
That timeline falls squarely in the midst of the sport’s postseason and has forced some teams like North Texas, Tulane and Ole Miss to compete for a spot in the 12-team playoff bracket in the midst of program upheaval.
Pernetti argues that it can create undue distractions and suggested a professional-league mechanism that allows for head coach transactions to take place upon completion of competitive play.
He referenced last year’s Independence Bowl in which Marshall withdrew from its game against Army after head coach Charles Huff left for Southern Miss and a wave of players entered the transfer portal. Army, the AC champion, instead played a five-win Louisiana Tech team.
“What kind of message does that send?” Pernetti said. “I think there’s a lot that needs to be looked at here. It’s not like we haven’t been having these discussions as commissioners. Sometimes, this change, it needs to happen a little bit more quickly [than the pace college sports traditionally operates at].”
Those changes, if they are to happen, will be made too late to normalize Friday’s league title game in which both sides will vie for a playoff berth with head coaches already assigned to power conference programs. Morris will be officially introduced as Oklahoma State’s head coach Monday afternoon. He doesn’t believe his eventual exit and early groundwork in Stillwater, Okla. has interfered with his preparation for Friday’s game.
Morris, who calls plays for the Mean Green’s nation-best offense, was officially announced Oklahoma State’s head coach last Wednesday. His team beat Temple 52-25 two days later to clinch a spot in the conference championship game.
“We know it’s a business,” North Texas offensive lineman Gabe Blair said Tuesday. “We see it all over the country. That’s just how it is. It doesn’t affect us at all.”
Sumrall said Monday afternoon that he held separate Zoom calls with Tulane recruits (to urge them to remain committed after his departure) and with Florida recruits (to urge them to remain committed after his hire) as part of his temporarily split duties. He was introduced at Florida Monday, was back in Green Wave gear Tuesday and oversaw recruitment Wednesday.
The Green Wave signed 13 players — 11 of whom had committed before Sumrall’s exit — Wednesday afternoon. The Gators signed 15 players.
The Mean Green have more former high school recruits that flipped and signed with Oklahoma State (seven) than they have currently committed (five) to the program. North Texas athletic director Jared Mosley said that the program’s focus will be on the transfer portal and that newly-minted head coach Neal Brown has “plenty of time” to assemble his staff and recruit in an X post Wednesday afternoon.
Morris declined to share the conversations that he had with the players that he recruited to North Texas but acknowledged that high schoolers are placed in difficult positions by the calendar and carousel.
“I don’t take it lightly that I recruited a ton of kids that thought I was going to be at North Texas right now,” Morris said. “All of the sudden, right before signing day, things change and it’s not anything that we did wrong or they did wrong, but they’re the guys that possibly could hurt the worst and not have a fit for them a couple of days before they’re expecting to sign with a coach and a staff.”
His departure has been significantly cleaner than former Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin’s. Kiffin, unlike Morris and Sumrall, was not granted the opportunity to coach the Rebels in the playoffs after he accepted the LSU head coach position last weekend. The fallout has evolved into a he-said-she-said of sorts and forced Ole Miss players to set records straight on social media.
Morris, admittedly, said that he did not take the optics of his exit into consideration when he first mulled the Oklahoma State opportunity. He did make efforts to keep Mosley informed early and often at each step of the process and conferred with Sumrall on how best to navigate the situation as both entered identical waters.
“I’ve never wanted to feel like I was doing something behind [Mosley’s] back or things he didn’t know about,” Morris said. “I didn’t know if that was the right thing to do at the time. Some of these things were happening a lot faster and it was a lot of first things for me.”
The Mean Green could be in line for their own first if they win Friday’s game and are granted entry into the playoffs. Ditto for the Green Wave.
Neither head coach will remain in place to reap the potential benefits. That’s not entirely abnormal when a Group of Five program has success and sees its orchestrator plucked by a power conference team. This season’s situation, those involved hope, will no longer be the status quo.
“It’s not sustainable,” Morris said. “There are so many things that aren’t sustainable with what we’re doing.”