Neal Brown led Troy to its best football season ever, for the second year in a row

Troy whomped North Texas in Saturday’s New Orleans Bowl at the Superdome, 50-30. The Trojans scored 29 points off five UNT turnovers and rolled to victory. That wrapped up the Trojans’ second consecutive best season ever.

Troy finished the year 11-2. That’s both the most wins and the best winning percentage the program’s ever posted. The previous highs were from 2016, when Troy went 10-3 (then a program wins record) and touched No. 25 in the AP Poll for the first time ever. The Trojans have now topped that wins total a year later, and it’s possible they’ll sneak into the final AP Poll of the season. We’ll see.

Neal Brown’s team has gone about this somewhat quietly, but Troy’s one of the best mid-major programs in the country right now. The Trojans tied with Appalachian State for the Sun Belt title, after coming up one game short of a share of the title in 2016. Their 21 wins in the last two seasons are, obviously, the program’s most ever in that span as an FBS program. The previous high was 17, achieved between 2008-09 and 2009-10.

They made their biggest national splash ever this year, when they beat LSU in a homecoming game at Death Valley, then roasted the Tigers on Twitter about it.

Some more on Brown, the team’s 37-year-old coach, from SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey:

Last year, Troy was a touchdown away from upsetting the eventual national champions. Clemson almost didn’t make it to the Playoff, because this team you might not have heard of pushed those Tigers to the brink, 30-24, in Week 2.

Some coaches would bristle at using a loss as a positive motivator.

“I don’t have any problems talking about it,” Brown told SB Nation in August. “Here’s what I say about the Clemson game: they were a better football team than us last season. They won the national championship. But I’m not sure they were the better football team that day.

“We were a program that had been struggling, hadn’t had a winning season since 2010. I knew we were going to succeed when we turned around, beat a good Southern Miss team that had just beaten Kentucky. And I think the Clemson game set us up for that.”

“One of the reasons I wanted to come to Troy was that, growing up just down the road, I always heard that Troy was that one small program that big schools were afraid to play because they knew Troy was coming in to give them all they got,” Calloway said. “I was like, ‘That’s the school for me.’ And then watching them play LSU when I was younger and almost beating them, almost beating Tennessee.”

Troy was 3-9 in 2014, the last year before Brown replaced Larry Blakeney as coach. It went 4-8 in Brown’s first year, and now the program’s taken off.