North Texas vs. Tulsa prediction: Thursday night college football picks, odds, best bet
Neither team will be on many radars right now, but it’s hard not to be impressed with the work that North Texas and Tulsa have done through the first month of the college football season.Each program has already pulled off an impressive upset, and they both will now fancy their chances of making some noise in the wide-open AAC this season.A win Thursday night, with both teams on short rest, will be a big step toward putting themselves in the mix of a conference that looks weaker than originally projected.Adding to the fun is the fact that oddsmakers are having a tough time separating these two teams for their battle at Skelly Field on Thursday night.Tulsa is a 1.5-point favorite on their home deck.Sometimes it’s not the worst thing in the world to clear the decks and start over in college football.After going 12-24 from 2022-24, Tulsa opted to go down that route, bringing in Tre Lamb to guide the program back from the doldrums.The Golden Hurricane didn’t turn things around immediately under Lamb, going 4-8 overall and 1-7 in the conference, but they did seem to establish something to build on for 2026.
Not only did Tulsa upset Oklahoma State and put an end to Mike Gundy’s tenure in Stillwater, but they also defeated Oregon State.It’s hard to call a 4-8 season a success, but in this context it was, and it looks even more impressive when you consider that Tulsa has carried the momentum into a 3-1 start to 2026.Lamb had one of the toughest gigs in college football last season, but nobody had a trickier one than Neal Brown at North Texas this summer.The Mean Green put together the best season in program history in 2025, but the end result was that head coach Eric Morris and star quarterback Drew Mestemaker bolted from Denton to run the show at Oklahoma State.
They took just about everybody they could with them, too.Nobody thought it would be a quick turnaround for North Texas, but Brown has this team in good shape.They got walloped by Indiana in Week 1 and ...