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We get it. But, why every f***ing thread?

I think we'll all do our part to make sure this business succeeds: By drinking in the parking lot while talking about how much we love sushi, and then never going inside.

Very intelligent and well-articulated reasoning. I didn't understand the merits of keeping him on before, but I can definitely see his point of view. Time to move on now and trudge forward.

MGB: UNT athletic director cites several factors http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2017/03/why-wren-baker-decided-to-wait-to-fire-tony-benford.html/

so there is an opinion on this board that, if you have a coach that has demonstrated over 5 years it is VERY LIKELY you will lose out and finish last, that you don't make any change because you might still lose out and finish last? Just want to make sure I understand.

What's everyone's opinion on "Rock and Roll Sushi" being printed on the sides of the Sushi Chef hats?

+100

MGB: Plus some tidbits on where UNT stands heading into the search http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2017/03/mgb-video-wren-baker-talks-about-unts-search-for-a-new-mens-basketball-coach.html/

First Team CUSA All Freshmen Team. http://conferenceusa.com/news/2017/3/7/MBK_0307170526.aspx

You have been wrong on the majority of your 28.5K posts but this one takes the cake. No, I am glad RV is not here so you are wrong there. I am not a shill that takes marching orders from anyone in the AD. In fact, I have never met or talked to anyone in the AD, past or present so you are wrong there. I do give a crap about the success of our athletics, wrong again. No, I don't consider WB changing his pants a major change. Wrong again, 0-4 so far. Mad that you are here. Wrong again. In fact, I like picking on you. Your senseless posts amuse me, you are my pet monkey that makes me laugh. I want this program to stay small and unimportant. Wrong again. Like usual you were wrong on 100% of your entire post. Go grab a banana and get some rest, I have a lot planned for you tomorrow.

What's telling is you ask me what hard decisions he has made and I respond back saying neither you nor I have a clue what decisions he has made. Your response doesn't address my statement at all. You don't have a clue what changes, major or minor, he has made. You also don't have a clue what you are talking about, just admit it and stop your senseless whining.

I don't know and neither do you. No way either of us has a clue what decisions, easy or hard, he makes on a daily basis. Anybody that claims to know is full of s**t. I wonder why you care since you are a Horned Frog now.

DRC: UNT's search for a new men's basketball coach begins with high hopes http://www.dentonrc.com/sports/sports-headlines/20170306-the-search-begins.ece

I would like to thank Brett Vito for having followed up on this question. Whether I like the answer depends on the future. Right now a lot of what he said sounds like the AD version of "coach speak" to me. If he is generally against mid-season changes that is not a disaster. But if he turns out to pair that with being too slow at the trigger even after the season, then that is a problem. I want to believe that he would not have given Benford a fourth , much less a fifth year, had he been here for all his tenure. So far however, I have not seen anything that makes me certain he would have. That said, the n is small so far. Softball -depending on how things go- might be the next test. I can see that WB has organisational talent and he sure is communicating better than RV. But the Wren also needs to hold his coaches accountable, which will mean he has to be a mean man sometimes and so far -from the outside without seeing all the details- it feels like he wants all coaches to think he is their best friend.

I don't think firing Benford halfway through year 5 when he never should have gotten year 3 or 4 would tell anyone anything other than you finally did what should have been done 3 years earlier. The coaching community is tight. They know more than anyone what a disaster Benford is as a head coach and how much rope he has been given. If anything, NOT firing Benford hurt the perception of this program with coaches, not the other way around.

Benford might have been a good x-and-o mind, but his downfall was an inability to coach the kids...on pretty much everything. im of the opinion that new blood likely would have equated to a new energy, better chemistry, and improved execution from fundamentals to game flow/strategy.

I mean, never mind the former players' quotes about the disaster that TB was and how they didn't get up for games. They were just cancers, you see.

There are coaches out there who seem to be able to take solid programs, and there are coaches who are able to take terrible teams and make them into solid winners--it seems that not every good coach can do both. JJ has shown that he can make something of a bad program at North Texas. As bad as the state of the program is right now, in some ways it was pretty comparable when JJ took it over before. He wouldn't be my first choice now, and I think we can do better, but if he could at least take the program to where he had it before, I could think of worse things.

Coaching changes are an opportunity. Not one you WANT to have but it's omelet making. I believe there are VERY few coaches who could be successful at any school. Things have to line up. Each school has its own culture, its own natural recruiting base, its own challenges, a coach has to have the right type of support, it goes beyond recruiting budget and salaries, you just have to get the right fit for all those pieces. Now in my not worth a Starbucks grande opinion AD's mess up more searches than they get right. Sometimes a school goes into a search overvaluing the job. You see it all the time. Schools take a flier at huge names for their spot in the college universe and suddenly hire Who? because they panic when they get a string of turndowns. When Arkansas hired Bobby Petrino he had turned them down early on. The AD finally gave up and hired a search firm who brought him Bobby Petrino. The difference? First time Arkansas told Petrino what the job paid, second time Petrino told Arkansas what the job paid. It was a search nearing disaster until they coughed up a lot more than they planned. Sometimes an AD gets played by agents. The agents have a client who is happy where they are but the agent wants to get the salary up, so they play a few schools to get the guys name out in the market to get the current school to deliver a better deal. Since a raise is the goal, it gets leaked. Get played enough and the search appears to be going south and with that some potential candidates get cold feet wondering what is wrong there that these guys are bailing out. Sometimes an AD just gets sucked in by a good history. Memphis botched a football search by hiring the top recruiter at LSU because he was a great recruiter. Well recruiting to Memphis isn't recruiting to LSU. Sometimes an AD is too sucked in by a great interview to not think about fit, the potential assistants (any competent search includes who are you hiring for your staff), and management skills. Best of luck Greenies.

*whispers into the void* What if we just wait to see who he hires before we continue to rip him?

If JJ wants to be considered, and makes contact, he should be looked at along with the others. We could do a helluva lot worse! I know the conventional wisdom about the second time around, and all that. His situation at LSU IS sad, per the article, because I believe the man can coach. JMHO.

Thankfully he is not holding his cards close to his vest.

UNT90, stop with the negative waves! Don't make me come thru this screen and cursor whip you! LOL! Let's see what happens with this hire.

Shtick?

WB knows more about basketball and running an AD than anybody on this board. He has come out with the exact reasons why he didn't fire TB in mid-season. Nobody can claim he was indecisive or plain didn't do anything about the situation, he absolutely followed his plan. You might not agree with his reasoning but please shut up with the same lame griping that he is sitting around doing nothing.

agree with him or not, you have to like his thought out responses.

When customers stop buying things, people get laid off but rarely will the CEO be fired as a direct result. They hold no water according to ... you? Good to see you're sticking to the script. Keep it up, someone will adopt you ... oh wait, TCU has already. Go whine and complain over on their board since you've said you no longer care about the North Texas basketball program.

Not being a member of that community, your argument sounds plausible. Also, I stopped buying season tickets after year 1. Obviously, I would have found any way out of that fiasco after that year... Certainly after 4 years it would have been obvious.

WB got a pass in basketball this year, because he could blame poor performance on the last guy. I hope the search for a new coach was going on long before the season began. Realistically, not a lot of basketball coaches are looking for jobs midyear and the ones that are, probably are not worth the entertainment. Making this job publicly available at the first possible moment its not viewed as rude to do so says WB is impatient. Making the move mid season, unless you have a guy ready to go, is irresponsible unless the head coach is a total ass hat. For all of Benford's inability to put a winning basketball team on the court, I feel like he is a decent guy. I say that knowing nothing about how he treats players.

I mean, how else will you know who they are?

Ahhhhh the beauty of the ignore button!

Again, not sure why you can't comprehend this, no way anybody outside the AD knows what changes have been made and what changes are in the works and what changes are pushed back to a later date. You have NO clue how an AD is run, but don't hesitate posting continously how it should be run. Not trying to shut you up, I think it's funny how consistently you are wrong. I think you are about the same as CougarQueen. Both supporters of other schools that don't have a life and have to frequent other fan boards.

"We will go and find a coach that will make us highly competitive in this league.” Wren, let's shoot higher than just CUSA. Baker is committed to finding the best possible candidate and is willing to pay whatever it takes. Being the first hire of his tenure, he understands the implications it could have. “If I have to come back and move some money or raise some money to get the right person, I would do that,” Baker said. “I believe the commitment to our university from our donors and fans is at an all-time high. This is an important, important hire at an important time for our athletic department and university.” I think The Wren gets it! Now, go make it happen.

It might, but I agree with 90 with regard to Scott Cross. He just received a contract extension through 2020 last spring. An offer from a solid basketball school is likely on his horizon. And even if not, he would probably better served to stay put with the winner he has built at UTA than to jump into the dumpster fire Benford has left in Denton.

All kidding aside, I drove alongside RV in his brand-spanking new Corvette the other day on Bell. I also felt really ill the rest of the day. Not if sure if the two are related.

Maybe he had other things on his plate? Like making sure our student athletes had the basic items they needed. When he came on board, there were some people sharing lockers, that is absolutely pathetic. I think you are so laser focused on his handling of TB, you lose track of just how in shambles our AD was in.

True, plus you have all the food critics calling them "Rock and Roll Music Sushi". This should clear all that up.

He's a heckuva coach. Junior College national championship, Elite Eight in Division II. Bailed out of Abilene Christian without coaching a game to be an assistant at Baylor. This isn't the first 20 win season in AState history but it's the first time we've won 20 before the conference tournament. Incredibly nice guy and hard worker. Right after he came to AState he started lifting with the team to figure out who to keep and who needed to get on the bus based on their work habits and attitude. One day when he was lifting one of the guys messed up at a station and the S&C coach called for up downs for everyone and Grant did them just like the players. They might run through walls for him but they'd be running hard when they hit the wall.

Fouts is the only football stadium I know of in which the playing field is equidistant to the sideline stands. You could spin the field 90 degrees and the goal posts would fit between the front row seats. This and the extremely low angle of the seats created horrible sightlines and a rediculous amount of distance between fans and the game. Hard to believe, but the distance between the front row seat at the 50....and the nearest point of the playing field is 33 1/2 yards...or 100.5 feet away. Making matters worst...the the engineers started the crown-rise right at the base of the stands. It rises..then plains off for the track...then continues to rise to the center of the field. So as a person sits at the 50 yard line on the front row....his/her line of sight is straight into the middle of the backs of everyone standing on the sideline during the game. This is why when you look at that famous arial view of the 2003 Baylor win no one is sitting in the first 7 to 8 rows. The pic was taken in the 2nd or 3rd quarter and those patrons learned to cheat backwards so they could actually see over the players to see the game. Its easily one of the lousiest designed football stadium layouts in the nation. Rick

That was for the assistant AD position that cat from Abilene Christian got. So close but yet so far.

AD (department) is crossing his name off the hit list ala Billy Madison? question, no info

I can't image there will be too many resume's better than JJ's that apply Proven success at the mid major level and P5 experience as a head coach

Every time he mentions it he gets a free Diet Coke, it is in his contract.

He also didn't mention Derek Thompson.

Kroger? Well, OK, but try the Safeway bowl first.

JJ would be an interesting hire. I wonder how this message board would respond. It might be amusing.

Personally, I will not believe any reports or accept any hires unless they are approved by UNT 90

J.J. played his collegiate career at LSU. There was more to it than pay.

@TheWestie, as much as I love the 2013 Master Plan since I got to contribute to it, Prez has said that they will pursue that plan as much as it makes sense, and change where it doesn't. The College of Music right now is lobbying hard to get use of the Fout for a completely new expansive facility. This way we could finally resemble even the likeness of our peer institutions and bring back together some rather physically disparate Divisions of the College.

The Hattiesburg Hustler will promise the finest of Pacific salmon pre-restaurant opening and advertise such ineffectively. But once the restaurant opens, customers will find only fish species found in Lake Ray Roberts offered on the menu... Also, a donation jar for Southern Miss athletics will be sitting on the register counter.