DENTON, TX — Neal Brown describes his first portal window as the head coach of North Texas as a college football version of “Groundhog Day.”

The Mean Green needed to sign roughly 50 new players over a 12- to 14-day window last month as the new staff raced against school starting and the portal closing while making sure each position room had a mix of young and old players to balance out the roster. 

North Texas hosted roughly 100 visitors over that two-week span. A group would show up on campus at night for a dinner, which was followed by some sort of entertainment. That group would wake up the next morning, eat breakfast, attend meetings about academics and then do a photo shoot before spending time with the offensive or defensive staff ahead of a final meeting with Brown. The group would then leave around 5 p.m., only to be replaced by a new one for dinner that night, and then the process started all over again. 

To pull it off, Brown had to put a lot of trust in his new staff. He laid out some overarching themes for what he wants a roster to look like and what type of player fits the culture he’s preparing to build at North Texas, but he entitled each of his position coaches to become the head coach of their room. Brown flipped roles with his assistants throughout that portal rush. He let them evaluate the players and set up the visits. Once those players were on campus, Brown could serve as a closer. 

“If I tried to micromanage our portal window, it would’ve been a cluster and there is no way we would’ve had the success we had,” Brown said. “It’s freeing. You hire these people and it’s got to be blind trust. I probably haven’t always worked that way, but that’s the way I am now. And this portal window was the ultimate blind trust.”

Learning to trust his assistant coaches implicitly was a process for Brown. His fingerprints were on every aspect of his four-year tenure at Troy from 2015-18, his first stint as a head coach. And it worked. The Trojans won 10-plus games in each of his final three seasons and were the Sun Belt champions in 2017. The program was 31-8 over his last three seasons and the .794 winning percentage over that span was third-best in the FBS behind Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney. 

That success earned Brown a job in the Big 12 as head coach at West Virginia. But he couldn’t repeat the heights of his time at Troy, finishing with 37-35 record in six seasons in charge of the Mountaineers. The high-water mark was in 2023 when they won nine games and were a Hail Mary loss to Houston from claiming the program’s second 10-win season as a Big 12 program. 

“It wasn’t that we necessarily failed. We were okay. We just never got over the hump,” Brown said of his six years at West Virginia. “At the start of my tenure, I treated the West Virginia job just like Troy. And what I mean by that is, I was really involved in everything.

“There are two issues with that. One, the job is bigger so you have more responsibility. Two, my life was evolving and my kids were getting older and that was my first priority. And so, as a father, I couldn’t do all those things.”

Brown was fired following the 2024 regular season, so he spent December and January reflecting on what went right and what went wrong with the Mountaineers as he leaned into being a full-time dad. He believes time will be friendly to his tenure at West Virginia and that there were some things out of his control that contributed to the program not turning the corner after the 2023 season. 

Brown’s road back to a head coaching chair began in silence during the spring as he started asking himself pointed questions like, when you get your next job, what are you going to continue to do and what are you going to do differently? He spoke to search firms and agents to get an idea on potential landing spots on future fits. 

“I really felt like the American Conference is where my landing spot was going to be,” Brown said. “And so, you start looking at places and doing research. As the season progressed, (North Texas) was having the best season in school history so you start paying more attention.”

Brown had plenty of time to research potential landing spots because he spent the 2025 season as the special assistant to the head coach. He describes that gap year as the “halftime” of his coaching career. The first quarter was Troy. The second quarter was West Virginia. The season with Steve Sarkisian’s Longhorns allowed Brown an opportunity to regroup after 10 straight seasons in the head coaching chair. It also allowed him to learn from people outside of his coaching tree. 

Brown, an all-state wide receiver in high school, grew up in Kentucky and was a senior in high school when Hal Mumme took over the University of Kentucky in the late 1990s. He chose to stay home because outside of Steve Spurrier at Florida, the Wildcats became one of the only big schools east of the Mississippi to throw the ball around. The staff he played for included Mumme, Mike Leach, Chris Hatcher, Sonny Dykes, Guy Morris, and Tony Franklin. 

Most of the passing concepts in Brown’s offense are the same as the ones he ran when he was 18 years old, albeit dressed up more with motion and shifts. It was time with Kirk Ciarrocca at Delaware and Mark Whipple at UMass, where Brown finished his college career, that rounded out his offensive philosophy with the basics of the run game and how to create matchups. 

Sarkisian is from a different tree, one with West Coast roots and principles. Brown could’ve joined a staff led by someone from the Air Raid Club, but he wanted to get outside of his comfort zone and add more dimensions to his arsenal as a head coach. He was an assistant for the first time in over a decade, and that allowed him a fresh perspective. One that maybe he forgot in the main chair at Troy and West Virginia. And he believes that fresh perspective will help him lead North Texas to championships. 

“It really helped me take a breath,” Brown said of his journey in 2025. “Now, for this job, I’m ready to go and I have a new perspective. I’m seeing it through the players’ eyes. I’m seeing it through the assistant’s eyes. And maybe I didn’t at the end of my tenure at West Virginia.” 

Brown chose North Texas for multiple reasons. One was location. Not only does the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex offer fertile recruiting grounds in the high school ranks and in the portal, it’s also home to a major airport with direct flights to everywhere in the nation, a luxury that Brown couldn’t use in recruiting while at Troy or West Virginia. The second was alignment from the top in the form of university president Dr. Harrison Keller and athletic director Jared Mosley. 

The third reason was resources. North Texas is well positioned to be a yearly contender in the American Conference because of the committed resources by the university and the program’s donors. And if you win the American, there is a good shot that you’re in the College Football Playoff. The Mean Green were offered a glimpse of their ceiling in 2025 when they won 12 games and reached the American Conference Championship game. Brown was hired to take them even further. A challenge he feels perfectly suited to accept. 

“We’re going to figure out how to maximize in this modern era of college football, maximize North Texas’ place in it,” Brown said. “We have built-in advantages that other programs at this level don’t have. We’re going to lean into that and maximize this place’s potential.”