Just part of some interesting history being posted on the official athletic site during the dog summer days.

No. 59 - A Look At The 1959 Sun Bowl Squad

When a debate (read: argument) about the greatest football teams in North Texas history is thrown out at the Athletic Center water cooler the 1959 squad is always heavily considered.

How could it not be? A squad that featured a pair of All-Americans in Abner Haynes (rightly considered the best athlete to ever suit up for NT) and Bill Carrico, not to mention Ed Gray, Sammy Stanger, George Herring, T.D. Parks and C. Dan Smith pounded out a 9-1 record, and earned a spot in the most prestigious bowl game the program has ever been apart of.

That '59 team rolled past UTEP (31-7), Cincinnati (21-6), Houston (7-6) and Louisville (39-7), and picked up its second consecutive Missouri Valley Conference Championship. The team set a MVC record for fewest passing yards allowed in a season at 581, holding its opponents to a school-record low 27 passing first downs.

As a matter of fact, that defense allowed just 196.5 total yards per game, which has been topped by only one other team in school history (1967 - 182.1).

Only Tulsa and NT's Sun Bowl opponent, New Mexico State, managed to down the Eagles that season.

100 Days, 100 Moments
http://www.meangreensports.com/ViewArtic...=205181034

From http://www.GoMeanGreen.com

Abner Haynes must have been in traction for UNT to have lost to Tulsa and New Mexico State that year. He was quite an exeptional athlete for that era and had he signed with the established NFL instead of with Lamar Hunt's Dallas Texans, he would be in the NFL Hall of Fame as UNT's 2'nd entry in that hallowed hall IMO. I've known Abner for years and some of the stories he could tell about racism back then would make any white person feel ashamed. I know it did me.

Once such story (and I'll make if brief) was when our Mean Green team took a train down to Houston to play UH and how the hotel would not let him enter their facilities. Abner went on to tell me it hacked off all the white players so much on the UNT team that they told hotel management where to put it and all stayed on the train that night with their star running back, Abner Haynes. Haynes is in the Kansas City Chief Hall of Honor, the Texas Sports Hall of Fame down in Waco and (of course) one of the charter members of the UNT Athletic Hall of Fame.

Yet the North Texas team that I wish I could have seen was the one that had all but beat an inside the Top 5 ranked Arkansas Razorbacks in the Fall of 1968; because later that same season Broyle's Razorbacks would play Darrell Royal's UT Longhorn in what sportswriters back then called "the Game of the Century." Our late, great receiver on that Mean Green football team, ie, Ron Shanklin later told me at a Dos Gringos lunch in Fort Worth that he had received a call from one of those Razorbacks on that 1968 team who told Shank'...."you guys beat us in that game except for the referees very "homer" call." If UNT had had all those close losses against known teams the last few decades wonder how much further up the NCAA totem pole we might be today?