North Texas 2025 Season Rewatch: Mestemaker Leads UNT to Comeback Win Against MAC Champion Western Michigan

GAME 1

The Mean Green headed to Kalamazoo for the second game of the 2025 season for what ended up being a game between the American’s No. 2 team and the MAC’s No. 1 team.

North Texas would erase a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit and beat Western Michigan 33-30 in overtime before the Mustangs would go on to finish 10-4 (losses to Michigan State, UNT, Illinois and Miami (OH)).

Here are some takeaways I had in my rewatch of North Texas’ 2025 season in preparation for Oklahoma State’s 2026 season.

An Impressive Comeback

The Mean Green trailed 24-10 at one point in this game and 27-17 in the fourth quarter before Drew Mestemaker led scoring drives of 65 and 68 yards to tie it and send it to overtime.

Mestemaker had a touchdown pass to Cameron Dorner in the back of the end zone with about 10 minutes to play that cut Western Michigan’s lead to 27-24. It was another beauty of a ball, not too dissimilar to a TD pass to Wyatt Young in the back of the end zone in UNT’s first game.

The Mustangs sort of crapped down their legs in the overtime period. They ran a wildcat play on their first play of OT but couldn’t handle the snap and had to fall on it for a 5-yard loss. They were doomed to a field-goal attempt after that.

Most of UNT’s overtime yardage came off Western Michigan mishaps, with a Mustang corner getting called for pass interference and an unsportsmanlike conduct within three plays, setting up a Makenzie McGill 3-yard touchdown run to win it.

As noted above, this ended up being a mighty fine win given the context of the rest of the season. Western Michigan started last season 0-3 with this loss sandwiched between losses to Michigan State and a Top 10 Illinois squad, but the Mustangs, for the most part, rolled from then on. Their only loss after the 0-3 start came in late October to Miami (OH), but then WMU got that win back in the MAC title game before thumping Kennesaw State 41-6 in the Myrtle Beach Bowl.

Time of Possession Might Not Mean a Whole Lot This Year

Western Michigan looked like the Group of Five’s version of Iowa for much of this one, so much so that I had to go check to see if WMU coach Lance Taylor had spent any time at Iowa (he hasn’t).

The first quarter flew by as the Mustangs got the ball first and essentially sat on it for much of the frame. Their opening drive took 6:52 off the clock, and Western Michigan didn’t even score, instead electing to punt from the UNT 32-yard line and pin the Mean Green at the 3-yard line.

In total, Western Michigan had the ball for 14-plus minutes more than UNT — nearly a whole quarter.

That led me to go look at North Texas’ season-long possession numbers. The Mean Green held the ball for 6:37:23 seconds during last season while UNT’s opponents had the ball for 7:22:37. That comes out to about a three-minute difference per game, which is interesting considering UNT won 12 of those games.

Time of possession didn’t matter in the Big 12 in the 2010s when points were in abundance. With Morris, OSU might be getting back to that.

Wyatt Young Is Good at Finding Space, Mestemaker Is Good at Throwing Footballs

Drew Mestemaker and Wyatt Young did the college football world a service by sticking together this year because they seem perfect for each other.

Through two games, Young has shown an innate ability to find openings in a defense, and Mestemaker is so good at throwing the football that no matter where that open grass is, he can usually get it to him.

The biggest example of that from this game came when Mestemaker hit Young for a 23-yard gain in which Young found the hole in a zone coverage. All these defenders around, and it didn’t matter:

The two connected on the game-tying drive at the end of regulation on a little wide receiver screen that Young, a high school quarterback, took 23 yards into the red zone.

Mestemaker finished 18-for-33 for 224 yards, two TDs and no INTs, while Young caught four balls for 59 yards.

Other Notes

• Ethan Wesloski had an outstanding open-field tackle in the first quarter. It looked like he was spying on the play before the QB took off and Wesloski tracked him down halfway across the field for no gain.

Wesloski had another solid performance, finishing with eight tackles and two tackles for loss.

• UNT spent much of the first half of this game pinned in its own half of the field. On one of those instances, Mestemaker made a ridiculous play on third down from his 1-yard line where he tight-roped the back of the end zone (no Dan Orlovsky here) before ripping a ball along the sideline to Christian Dorner for a 19-yard gain.

• Mestemaker is a better runner than he gets credit for. He had 24 rushing yards in this game on five carries, but he was sacked three times, making those already solid numbers look worse than they actually were. He had a big 31-yard gain at one point. Everyone in Stillwater will be yelling “slide!” as he took another decent shot on the end of that run.

• The Western Michigan kicker must’ve had a horseshoe in his pocket. He banged a PAT in off the upright to give WMU a 24-10 lead and then hit the ball off the other upright and in to make it 27-17. Naturally, he hit his 48-yard field goal in OT right down the middle.

• UNT has had a little bit of trouble inside the 5-yard line in these first two games, an issue I’m waiting to be remedied by the emergence of Caleb Hawkins.

• Speaking of one of the top running backs in the transfer portal this offseason, Hawkins played 0 snaps in this game. All the more crazy that he finished as the national leader in TDs.