AAC Basketball: Analyzing the 6 new potential additions for league
By Joey Loose
North Texas
Even with Houston departing the Big 12, the AAC still has a footprint in the state of Texas, with SMU still remaining in the league. The addition of North Texas (and a few others) would only increase that footprint. North Texas would give another new natural rival, as the program isn’t too far away from SMU, and would build the AAC’s presence in northern Texas as a whole.
From a basketball standpoint, this is the best of the six proposed schools considering the current direction of the Mean Green. A program recently struggling, things have turned around at North Texas since the hiring of Grant McCasland in 2017. He won at least 20 games in each of his first three seasons with the Mean Green but did even better in year four. Last season, North Texas won the C-USA Tournament (winning three games as the underdog), and upset 4-seed Purdue in the NCAA Tournament, earning the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament victory.
Though a hot name this past offseason as the coaching carousel spun around, McCasland returns to North Texas having already built success in a brief time with this program. There’s no guarantee that the Mean Green will continue to field teams capable of something like this, especially with Javion Hamlet gone, but they’ve certainly shown a lot more recently than the other potential C-USA additions, and frankly more than those middling teams at the bottom of the AAC standings.