If a team isn’t going to be any good, it might as well try to be interesting. Florida International has spent the majority of this century muddling around the bottom third of D-I in terms of quality while transitioning from one unremarkable style to another. I appreciate that second-year head coach Jeremy Ballard decided to change that.
Ballard decided that the Panthers would run like hell while trying force as many turnovers as possible, and they caught C-USA a bit by surprise in 2019: they improved by two games in the league standings over the year prior and finished with a winning record overall for the first time since 2013.