TheTastyGreek

Honored to serve. I think I speak for everyone when I say: thank you to me for my courage. And on behalf of myself responding to myself on behalf of you all, I say: you are very welcome.

Just to elaborate a bit... In the past decade, we've had athletes or former athletes busted for organized theft rings, stealing debit/credit cards, stealing repeatedly from retail stores, murdered in parking lots by drug dealers, working out at our facilities while under felony charges for hit-and-run, and those are just what I can remember off the top of my head. Never before have we felt the need to get a Baylor or Penn State style independent legal review to make sure that there's no institutional corruption or criminality. This time, we did... And the reasoning for it came from an investigation that is already 5 weeks old and making a very slow and deliberate arrest path, where the university president has already been privately briefed. I don't remember Rawlins or Bataille or whoever needing private police briefings and outside auditing to handle any of the other felonious activity that touched on our scholarship athletes and staff. This time, we do. I'm fascinated and horrified to find out why.

Could be. But... Given that this has been under investigation for over a month, and it was deemed serious enough for Smatresk to get a briefing a week ago, and we already had a legal firm on the job and a lengthy half stern, half vague statement prepared for when Brice got popped... I doubt this is all just a low level misunderstanding. It merits mentioning that Brice's only charge seems to be weed. But there's at least two other people directly connected to Benfordball still unnamed that have the heavier warrants waiting for them. Best case scenario, this is already almost certain to ring out way uglier than the Dodge drug testing debacle, and that made national news. This has drugs, prostitution, some sort of criminal conspiracy, sexual assault, three people connected to our athletics program (as of now) and an independent legal firm running a parallel investigation. It could go no bigger, no further, and no uglier than what's already out there, and it's still a disgrace that'll tarnish us for a good long while. The fact that we're seemingly trying to get ahead of whatever is actually going on with this situation makes me worried that this is going to get pretty damn messy. Probably not Baylor bad, and definitely not Penn State bad... But maybe Louisville bad? Who knows! It's all Green, and it's all Gonna Come Out Eventually. So, let it fly and hope that it's wide open enough not to block out our green light to greatness, or something.

They peddle drugs, not people, and it's been a while. Just another sign that there's no such thing as bad publicity. This criminal conspiracy/prostitution story has even our most hostile and disillusioned fans following the program again! Sucks to be you, Baylor. We're going to steal all that athlete sex crime media heat. Why not North Texas, indeed!

Just imagine the shenanigans they might have gotten into if we had fired Benford mid-year! Hell, we're just lucky this wasn't some sort of international assassin, murder-for-hire situation like we'd probably have gotten without the steadying, fatherly, guiding hand of Benford for the full 5th year. Thanks, Wren! They're dead last in their division, man. They have their own problems to deal with.

If there's one true villain here, I think it's obviously @UNT90.

I just hope McCasland turns out to be a significant Upgrayedd over our last coach.

Not surprising. At 7', he's an old school center. Not a stretch 4 like some of the modern guys with 3 point or 4 pointer shooting range.

Gotta give the law firm to the very end of bball season to properly evaluate the situation before commenting or announcing any action.

Benford encouraged a real family atmosphere. So, if this is true, at least we can take comfort and pride in the fact our guys weren't just running a dirty old whorehouse. It was surely a healthy and nurturing whoreHOME.

Sure is. One thing on that, though...

P5 is Big 10, Big 12, SEC, PAC 12, and ACC. Big East and consolidation from 6 to 5 already went down. If another conference breaks apart and the choice teams get absorbed into the other 4 conferences, it'll almost certainly be Big 12 or ACC, right? Probably Big 12 since there are fewer schools impacted and the marquee programs that would need to shift to survive are fewer and higher profile.

I just assumed he was asking him on 50 First Dates.

Watching him on screen, growing from Encino boy to Encino Man... Does it feel like he's practically my own son? You bet your Astin it does!

You're just pissy because @All About UNT won't let you call guys hunky anymore. Don't lash out in anger.

Well, if you'll send pics in advance, plz... This is obviously @Green P1 territory. Just don't call him "brah". Nothing's free in waterworld. And Billy Ocean doesn't have an account here.

Buddy, I’ve been called a greasy thug, too. It never stops hurting. So here’s what we’re gonna do: we’re gonna grease ourselves up real good and trash that place with a baseball bat!

Those are the guys that stuff things up the rectum of animal corpses and keep the results mounted in their basements, right? Obviously, @Quoner. NEXT! Ordinarily I'd suggest @CaribbeanGreen I believe certain legal issues prohibit him from being near minors. Or playgrounds and schoolyards. Though maybe he just has to explain the situation in advance? I forget how it works.

@oldguystudent Next?

@BonfireBrian

Building on what Stix said, enrolling as a resident vs. a non-resident will save you about half or more of the potential cost for tuition and fees. Here's a link to UNT's official site that talks about residency: http://registrar.unt.edu/transcripts-and-records/residency-information ...and here's a brief summary from another school's site that lays out what it takes: It can be a lot for a fresh high school graduate to move across the country to an unfamiliar place, work, and make a healthy and happy go of things without the structure and support of a traditional college experience right away. But, if you think you're up to it, you can save yourself a substantial amount of money. Specifically, I'd suggest spending a year with a part time job and as many credit hours as you think you can handle at one of the DCCCD campuses. All of them should have clear transfer policies established with UNT, and an advisor on either the UNT or DCCCD end can give you a very clear plan for what will transfer without hassle, saving you even more money on your ultimate degree cost. If you're comfortable with public transport, every campus in the DCCCD system is served by DART bus. North Lake in Irving actually has a dedicated DART rail stop, so you could find somewhere to live on the Orange Line and just rail over directly every time you have class. If you can do at least two courses per semester, you should be eligible for a DART GoPass, which means you ride for free. DCCCD main page: https://www.dcccd.edu/Pages/default.aspx DART GoPass page: https://www.dcccd.edu/services/OnlineServices/Discounts/Pages/DARTGoPass.aspx DCCCD tuition calculator: https://www.dcccd.edu/pc/Cost/Tuition/Pages/TuitionCalc.aspx#in-county UNT tuition calculator: http://studentaccounting.unt.edu/traditional-tuition-plan-calculator Just to put a number on it, if you average 15 hours a semester... The difference in tuition and fees between being a Texas resident and a non-resident at UNT is a little over $10,000 per year. And a full year (to establish residency) with you taking courses at a DCCCD campus would save around $8-9k in tuition and fees compared to what the year would cost you at UNT, even as a Texas resident. So, if you can make it work for a year and a day, you should be able to save enough to buy a decent used car and get yourself around Denton after establishing residency and enrolling at UNT. And you'd have a good chunk of your basic courses out of the way at a radically reduced rate. Hope this helps.

Exactly. Christmas is a time for family. No surprise he'd be home in Oklahoma to celebrate this weekend.

Somewhere, Robert Frost is smiling.

I don't want to belabor the point, but nobody else seems to much notice or care that this is a pretty troubling and significant screw-up that reflects very poorly on us and program leadership. So, one contrarian post, and I'll try to walk away from the topic and not beat people down with my opinion. With all due respect to guys like @GrandGreen and @Mean Green 93-98, who are people I can frequently disagree with on UNT stuff but always still like and appreciate because it tends to be in a limited, respectful, non-personal (I hope?) manner... This is not much ado about nothing, and it's not something to yawn about. This is embarrassing, concerning, and completely unnecessary. We had an entire month to get this figured out, and a clear deadline to get it done. So, the Mandy McKinley approach to contractual fulfillment ("If you haven't gotten your buyout yet, it's because you haven't called us, or we haven't called you!") doesn't fly. We should not be screwing stuff like this up. The previous leadership here came under a lot of scrutiny, much of it justified, because of a number of much less significant screwups. Mislabeled Christmas cards, typos in press releases and game recaps, delayed emails and news updates... Well, this is 1000 times worse. This isn't some intern or low-level employee forgetting to spellcheck something. This is the guy at the head of our entire program not bothering to execute a half million dollar payment in a timely fashion, when we had a full month to figure it out. And when we've brought in 3 other high salary upper-level support team members that ought to help make this sort of big picture, high dollar stuff run easier and better. If you ever got upset because your Heart of Dallas bowl tickets didn't get shipped in time for you to get them, if you've ever been pissed off over your seatbacks not being in place, or your email inbox getting an invitation to a game or event that already happened... How can you blow this off? We owed another school HALF A MILLION DOLLARS, and we couldn't even handle the simple process of transferring them the money by the legally required deadline. I'm not saying Wren Baker is incompetent, or calling for anyone to be fired, or claiming the sky is falling. But this is very bad, very dumb, and absolutely unnecessary and avoidable. Contrary to frequent opinion, it IS possible to be pissed off, frustrated, and embarrassed without carrying that out to an absurd extended hypothetical. I'm not calling for pitchforks and torches, but people ought to recognize that this matters, and we damn sure ought to care enough to demand accountability to make sure huge, stupid, public errors like this don't happen again. Hopefully, this is an isolated incident. I don't intend to say anything else on the matter unless someone replies in a way that wants to continue the conversation. You are free to disagree. Go Mean Green.