North Texas Daily

Akshay Mirchandani / Sports Editor

Both the Mean Green football team and Southern Methodist University Mustangs lost to Big 12 teams on the road last week. Neither team scored on offense. On Saturday, both teams will play each other at Apogee Stadium.

The Mean Green is 4-28-1 all time against SMU. In the last meeting, in 2007, the Mustangs downed the Mean Green 45-31. Because of the close proximity people consider the Mean Green and Mustangs rivals, but head coach Dan McCarney said that UNT needs to start winning for it to become an actual rivalry.

“We’re going to do everything we can to turn it into a great rivalry,” McCarney said. “Which means every year, no matter who you play where, their place or ours, both programs, both sets of players, both sets of coaches, both sets of fans everybody feels like they have a shot to win the game.”

UNT is coming off a dismal offensive performance against the University of Texas. Both sophomore quarterback Josh Greer and junior quarterback Andrew McNulty combined to go 3-17 for 15 yards and four interceptions. As a team, the Mean Green had 94 yards of total offense. The offensive line also struggled as both quarterbacks were sacked a combined four times.

“We’re pretty much doing everything to prepare,” Greer said. “We’re getting extra film work in, we’re working a little after practice. We’ve already talked about it as an offense, we’re really just trying to come together this week and fix everything that we did wrong”

The Mean Green defense played a nice game against Texas, holding them at bay for much of the first half. SMU’s offense is coming off a game in which they were held to just 67 yards of total offense, but despite that the UNT defense is still expecting a tough game from the Mustangs.

“We know they pass a lot so we’re going to continue to build on that,” sophomore linebacker Fred Scott said. “We’re going to continue to build our defense. We had a pretty good game, we think, so we’re just going to continue to build on that. It only goes up from here.”

The game will also be the Mean Green home opener. The team has gone 12-5 at Apogee Stadium since McCarney took over as head coach, including a 5-1 record last season. This game will also mark the beginning of beer sales, outside of the club seats, at Apogee.

“We got an 11:00 kickoff or 11:05, whatever it end up being, on national television,” McCarney said. “I just hope our fans will really respond. When you go 1-16 to 12-5 at home, you think we’ve done that by ourselves? No. We need our fans. I hope we can pack this place”

This will begin a three game homestand, and it kicks off at 11:00 AM. The game can be viewed on Fox Sports 1.