North Texas Football: How a 5-7 Season Quietly Explains the Collapse of the Liberal World Order

North Texas Football: Where Gridiron Dreams Meet Geopolitical Reality
By Our Man in the Airport Lounge (Still Waiting for the Non-Existent Dallas–Pyongyang Direct)

Denton, Texas—population slightly smaller than Reykjavík, slightly larger than the standing army of Luxembourg—has improbably become the latest laboratory for exporting American anxiety in shoulder-pad form. The North Texas Mean Green just wrapped a season that finished 5-7, which, in the cosmic ledger of college football, is the sporting equivalent of a mid-level diplomat tweeting “thoughts and prayers” after a coup. Yet the reverberations from Apogee Stadium (sponsored by a local bank whose name sounds like a failed boy band) are being felt from Doha boardrooms to betting apps in Manila.

Let’s zoom out. While COP28 delegates in the UAE argued over who gets to sell the last barrel of oil, North Texas was busy burning 2.3 megawatt-hours per home game—enough to light every streetlamp in Moldova through a long winter. The carbon footprint of a single halftime light show could offset the annual virtue-signaling of a Scandinavian prime minister, but nobody in Denton seems especially torn up about it. They’re too busy arguing on Reddit over whether the new offensive coordinator’s playbook is “Air Raid” or merely “Air B-n-B”—flashy, overpriced, and likely to leave you stranded in Waco at 2 a.m.

Globally, college football remains America’s most successful cultural ransomware. European streamers who once scoffed at the sport now binge 11-hour Saturdays the way they once chain-smoked Gauloises—hooked by the sheer, unapologetic excess. In Singapore, a fintech bro recently paid USD 4,000 for a single ticket to the Frisco Bowl, claiming it was “cheaper per hour than Formula 1 and the catering is worse, which feels authentic.” Meanwhile, the athletes themselves—technically unpaid, unless you count the going rate for an autograph in the SEC—navigate the new Name-Image-Likeness economy like fledgling crypto founders, minus the regulatory clarity.

North Texas quarterback Austin Aune (rhymes with “ruin,” foreshadowing not entirely coincidental) announced his fourth transfer portal entry last month, prompting La Liga scouts to ask, genuinely perplexed, “Is this free agency or a witness-protection program?” The portal itself—essentially Tinder for 19-year-olds who can squat 500 pounds—has become a geopolitical flashpoint. The Chinese Super League tried to poach a backup punter because analytics suggested his hang time could “project soft power across the Pacific.” The deal collapsed when the kid discovered TikTok was banned in China and, therefore, so was his personal brand.

What does it all mean? In a year when FIFA expanded the World Cup to 48 teams, effectively granting participation trophies to nation-states, North Texas clings to the quaint notion that five wins and seven losses still constitute a narrative arc. There is something almost heroic in that stubbornness, like a Japanese holdout on a Philippine island who hasn’t heard the war ended. The Mean Green’s recruiting pitch—“Come play in the AAC, the conference so mid even the acronym sounds like a shrug”—somehow lands with teenagers who’ve grown up watching dystopian TikToks set to slowed-down Radiohead. Perhaps the real product being exported isn’t football at all, but the delusion that somewhere, under Friday-night lights, the apocalypse can be delayed by one more third-and-long.

The broader significance? While BRICS nations debate dedollarization, the University of North Texas just inked a deal to pay its coaching staff in—wait for it—season tickets and exposure. The athletic department’s balance sheet currently resembles a failed NFT project, but optimism persists because, as an assistant AD told me between swigs of Dr Pepper, “Debt is just a narrative, bro.” In that sense, Denton has become a microcosm of the global order: overleveraged, overheated, and oddly convinced that next year’s recruiting class will fix everything.

As the stadium lights dim and another season slides into oblivion, the crowd files out past a banner reading “Mean Green Fights On.” Somewhere in the parking lot, an economics major from Mumbai live-streams his existential meltdown to 1.2 million followers, captioning it “Third World Problems, First World Stadium Bathrooms.” The world keeps spinning, carbon keeps rising, and North Texas football keeps punting on fourth-and-reality. Which, if you squint at the geopolitical scoreboard, is the most American play call of all.