Mean Green Blog

The Sun Belt Conference had a post-spring practice media call today with all the league's head coaches – well, all the league’s coaches except FAU's Howard Schnellenberger. He often assigns his associate head coach Kurt Van Valkenburgh to attend to such mundane tasks.
Anyway, thanks to an old friend Adam Sparks who covers Middle Tennessee, the main topic of conversation was the league's quarterbacks. Troy will be the only team in the Sun Belt without a returning starter under center next season.

Be sure to pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper, which will have a story on what the league's coaches had to say about this season's quarterback crop and some of the players in it. Until then here are a few other notes:

A few other Sun Belt teams have followed North Texas' lead and are offering recruits scholarships before their senior seasons. FIU has offered 27 players, while Troy has offered 12, according to Rivals.com.

FIU head coach Mario Cristobal said the practice is something his team would follow throughout his tenure.

"It's the same process that we had at Rutgers," Cristobal said. "If we believe in them, we attack them and that includes offering them early. We do a thorough background check and believe in being proactive."

The topic of nonconference games also came up. MTSU will play Maryland at home this year and lost to Virginia at home last year. Landing home games against teams of that caliber is somewhat of a break from the norm for Sun Belt teams that have often sent their teams on the road for big paydays.

UNT has made some progress in that regard with a scheduling philosophy that centers on recruiting regional rivals, including Tulsa, Rice and SMU instead of playing multiple guarantee games on the road each season.

"It's critical for our conference to get some of the BCS teams to come to our place," Stockstill said. "We have sold ourselves out a little too much, although I understand why we do that. We earned the right to have teams come to us. We have beaten teams from the Big 12 and SEC. It's time for them to come to our place."

While Troy doesn’t have a returning quarterback, it has picked a starter in Jamie Hampton, a sophomore who backed up Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year Omar Haugabook last season.
"We lost a great one we will never forget here," Troy coach Larry Blakeney said of Omar Haugabook, last season’s Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year. "Jamie Hampton is a sophomore who played some last year. Levi Brown and Tanner Jones are in the mix. We have them ranked in that order."

Since the topic of the day was quarterbacks, our Mean Green Blog question of the day is: Are you confident that Giovanni Vizza will be among the elite quarterbacks in the Sun Belt next season? Post your thoughts on the Mean Green Blog.