Of all the star players on North Texas’ Sun Belt Conference championship teams, quarterback Scott Hall seemed like he would among the easiest to replace.

Hall never threw for 2,000 yards or tossed 20 touchdown passes in a season. He was a first-team all-conference selection just once after his junior year.

Five seasons have passed since Hall graduated in 2004, and if there is anything that time has shown, it is that finding the right quarterback has been a whole lot more difficult than anyone expected for UNT.

Six players have started at least one game at quarterback since Hall left UNT, which will have a new opening-game starter yet again in 2010.

Riley Dodge moved to wide receiver in the off-season due to the cumulative effects of injuries to his arm. Nathan Tune started two games in relief of Dodge last season and is competing with sophomore Derek Thompson for the starting job.

If Thompson earns the right to start, he will be the seventh player to start at quarterback for UNT in six seasons.

The pair will split time with the first and second team offenses at 8:30 a.m. today in the Mean Green’s second scrimmage of fall practice, which will be one of the last chances for both players to show what they have to offer.

Head coach Todd Dodge said he expects to name a starter on Tuesday or Wednesday for UNT’s season opener at Clemson on Sept. 4, when either Tune or Thompson will try to show that he is the quarterback the Mean Green has been looking for since Hall graduated.

“Quarterback is not the easiest position to play,” Tune said. “It takes the right fit. You have to be able to throw it, recognize defenses, run occasionally and keep your cool in the pocket. There are a lot of different things you have to have to able to do, which is why not everyone can play quarterback.”

What makes UNT’s search so baffling is that the Mean Green ran an offense predicated on the running game that didn’t require a gunslinger for two seasons after Hall graduated under Darrell Dickey. Noted quarterback guru Todd Dodge replaced Dickey and hasn’t had much better luck in three seasons since.

UNT had what appeared to be a good fit once in Daniel Meager in the Dickey era and had two players who looked like the perfect solution under Dodge and Giovanni Vizza and Riley Dodge.

Each had some success, but none turned out to be what UNT has been looking for – a player who can produce, limit mistakes and, most importantly, lead UNT to wins.

UNT hasn’t won more than three games in a season since Hall’s senior season when the Mean Green finished 7-4 and won the last of four consecutive Sun Belt Conference titles.

“If you would have told me in year four we would have started three or four different quarterbacks, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Dodge said of his tenure. “I would have thought things would have gone a different way.”

A tragic beginning

UNT’s problems at quarterback began tragically at a time when the Mean Green appeared loaded at the position.

Hall led UNT to the Sun Belt title in 2001 before suffering a torn pectoral muscle in a season-opening loss to Texas that shelved him for the rest of the season. UNT turned to redshirt freshman Andrew Smith and saw him respond by leading the Mean Green to a second straight Sun Belt title and a win over Cincinnati in the New Orleans Bowl.

Hall regained the starting job the next year, which left UNT with a perfect line of succession set up. Hall would finish his career in 2004 and Smith would take over as a senior in 2005, leaving UNT time to develop its young quarterbacks, including Joey Byerly and Daniel Meager.

UNT had to scramble after Smith died in a car accident on Aug. 7, 2004, just days before he was to arrive in Denton for fall practice.

The Mean Green pulled together and won a fourth straight Sun Belt title that season, but Byerly failed to meet eligibility requirements heading into the 2005 season. Meager ended up taking the first snap of his college career as UNT’s starter at Middle Tennessee.

UNT won that game 14-7 in a defensive struggle, but has won just nine games since while changing starting quarterbacks from season to season and sometimes week to week.

UNT’s problems show that it can be tough to project who will be successful no matter what their credentials were in high school or junior college.

“College football is so much different than high school,” Thompson said. “Anyone will tell you that. The college game is more physical. Sometimes people are successful at it, sometimes they are not. It depends on what system you are in and your relationship with your coaches.”

A constant state of flux

Meager started the entire 2005 season, but the Mean Green went 2-9, putting Dickey under pressure to push the team back to the top of the Sun Belt the next year.

UNT brought in junior college transfer Woody Wilson and also had Matt Phillips on the roster. All three started at times in 2006.

Wilson looked like the answer when he led UNT to one of its biggest wins in recent years – a 24-6 victory over SMU in the second week of the season.

Wilson never built on that win, which left UNT rotating quarterbacks through the end of Dickey’s final year at UNT.

Expectations were high when Dodge took over and brought his spread offense and a history of developing quarterbacks to UNT. Dodge immediately signed Giovanni Vizza, one of the state’s top quarterbacks, who backed out of a commitment to Nevada to sign with the Mean Green.

Dodge plugged Vizza in early in his first season at UNT and saw him earn Freshman of the Year honors in the Sun Belt. Just one season later Vizza became disenchanted with the program after UNT lost 17 of the 20 games he started and transferred to Texas A&M

 “I can only speak for my time here, and we felt we absolutely found the right guy in Giovanni Vizza,” Dodge said. “We knew we were going to take some lumps. The building process was on and we invested 20 starts in him. Out of nowhere, he left. When you start a program, you throw a young quarterback in there. By year three you have a guy who has played a lot of football.”

At the time, it didn’t appear as if the loss of Vizza would be the program killer it turned out to be because UNT had signed Riley Dodge, the son of UNT’s head coach. Dodge backed out of a commitment to Texas to play for his father and was one of the highest rated prospects ever to sign with the Mean Green.

Even that didn’t work out for UNT.

Dodge started for just one season as a redshirt freshman and suffered a separated shoulder and a broken arm. By the time spring practice rolled around earlier this year, Dodge had nerve damage in his elbow sever enough to force him to move to wide receiver.

“We recruited Riley because we thought he was the best fit in the state of Texas for what we did offensively,” Todd Dodge said. “Unfortunately, he is not able to play the position of an every day basis now.”

That leaves UNT right back where it started in 2005, looking for someone, anyone, who can come close to what Hall accomplished – not so much in terms of his statistical output, but in his unique mix of talent, intangibles and leadership that helped him win 23 games as a starting quarterback at UNT.

Being the next Scott

To gauge the impact of Hall, one has to look deeper than his career numbers – even though they are impressive when it comes to the history of UNT football.

Hall set the UNT record with a career passing efficiency rating of 132.26 and ranks fourth in school history with 5,975 passing yards.

Critics often site that he was far from the focus of the offense and played with two national rushing champions in Patrick Cobbs and Jamario Thomas.

Even Hall admits that he had a whole lot of help.

“Every year I had a good wide receiver, a good tight end like Andy Blount and a good running game,” Hall said. “Every running back I handed the ball to was a record-setter. It’s easy when defenses put eight men in the box and you can throw it over their heads. We were fine with throwing the ball 12 to 20 times a game and scoring on three of them.”

The biggest testament to the value of Hall was that he typically cashed in on his opportunities. One of Hall’s best games came in a 33-28 win over Middle Tennessee in the 2003 season. He threw the ball just 13 times, but completed 10 of his attempts for 230 yards, including touchdown strikes of 63 and 46 yards to Joel Nwigwe.

Hall never threw for 300 yards in a game. The feat is one three quarterbacks have reached a total of eight times since Hall graduated.

UNT has lost all eight of those games.

Those losses have had to do with more than quarterback play, but it does point to Hall’s value.

“The success I had was due to a mixture of good coaching, getting us into the right situations, the work I put in off the field and knowing what I was supposed to do,” Hall said. “When I was in the game, coach gave me three or four plays and I called the play at the line of scrimmage. I was able to put us in the right position. It was more brains than anything else.”

Finding the right guy

The question UNT faces is whether or not it finally has the right guy this season in Thompson or Tune.

Tune has limited playing experience and Thompson has nearly none at all after playing in just one series in a loss to Arkansas State at the end of last season. To make matters more challenging, the pair is working with a new offensive coordinator in Mike Canales who took over UNT’s offense in the off-season.

Fortunately for UNT, Canales has coached his share of standout quarterbacks on the college level, including Phillip Rivers, the San Diego Chargers starting quarterback who played for Canales at North Carolina State.

“Do I believe there is a guy here who is capable of leading us to a championship or a bowl game? Yes,” Canales said. “I see the talent, work ethic and the look in their eyes that I saw from a lot of guys who led teams I helped coach to great victories in my career. There is no doubt in my mind that they are capable. It’s about having that kid who can get everyone around them to play above their potential.”

Both Tune and Thompson have earned the trust of their teammates, who believe whoever wins the job will be able to lead UNT to heights it hasn’t reached since Hall graduated.

“Both of them are good kids with big arms who are accurate,” UNT wide receiver Jamaal Jackson said. “These guys are ready to step in and lead us to a conference championship.”

BRETT VITO can be reached at 940-566-6870. His e-mail address is bvito@dentonrc.com.