Mean Green Nation: UNT Football and the House on the Highway

Right where Interstate Thirty-Five splits into its east and west branches through Denton, you can see DATCU Stadium perched above the highway, its winged end zone canopy saluting the sky like a spread eagle. That silhouette is intentional. The University of North Texas chose a design shaped like the school's flying eagle logo, making the stadium visible to every driver passing beneath it.

North Texas football has been at it since nineteen thirteen, but for forty seasons the team played on bare steel bleachers at Eagle Field, a simple rectangle near the middle of campus that held barely two thousand five hundred fans. It was Athletic Director Theron Fouts who pushed for something better. In nineteen fifty-two a new concrete bowl opened on the southwest corner of campus, twenty thousand seats, a running track, and real locker rooms. After Fouts died of a heart attack in nineteen fifty-four, the university renamed the field in his honor, and Fouts Field stood as the home of Mean Green football for nearly sixty years.

The nickname "Mean Green" has its own small legend. In nineteen sixty-six, the sports information director's wife started shouting "Go Mean Greene" at games, either cheering sophomore defensive lineman Charles "Mean Joe" Greene or just the team's fierce defense, accounts vary on that. What's not in dispute is what Greene became: a Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steeler, four-time Super Bowl champion, and the face of one of the most famous Coca-Cola commercials in television history. He is the most celebrated athlete in UNT history.

In twenty eleven, the university opened the stadium you see now, designed by HKS Sports and Entertainment Group, the same firm behind the Dallas Cowboys' AT and T Stadium. It became the first collegiate football stadium in the country to earn LEED Platinum certification, the highest green building designation. The naming rights have changed twice: first Apogee Telecom purchased them, then Denton-area credit union DATCU signed a record deal in twenty twenty-three, giving the stadium its current name.

Fouts Field was torn down in stages, the north end zone stands in twenty thirteen, the rest in twenty eighteen. But the Mean Green play on, and their stadium rises every day above the highway that defines this corridor.