NTXCoog

I'm excited. I plan on coming to my first UNT game since the stadium opener against my Coogs. And yes, I will be cheering for the Mean Green.

I am intrigued by this statement, and I may partially agree with it. It's not a surprising offense anymore that no one has seen. But why is that? It has become mainstream because teams are having great success with it on every level of football from high school, college, and pro including Super Bowl champions. It's not just a gimmick. Its run will end at some point like every other innovation. The Veer was the most dominant offense in the late 1960s. It involved into the Wishbone and other triple option offenses and soon everyone ran some version of the triple option including the big powers. But that stopped. Oddly enough a Wishbone offense is now considered a gimmick while in the 1970s, it was pretty much a standard offense. In the late 1980s, the Run and Shoot was the newest innovation and was nearly unstoppable. Eventually that evolved into the Spread and many teams run it, even some teams at the highest level of college football. Possibly it stops if the majority of the powerhouses adopt it and they dominate not only due to talent, but talent and scheme. What's the next innovation? I don't know, but it's past due. It may be the dual threat running/passing QB option offense, but I don't think that's it. That involves too much dependence on one player instead of the system. Plus most of the biggest innovations start at a lesser known school and VERY slowly work their ways up the ranks as their effectiveness is proven. The dual QB has already been at the highest levels of college ball.

Air Force is definitely not a pro style offense either. Run based (non pro style) offenses like the pistol/wishbone/veer can work in a similar way to Spread offenses and be equalizers. They can recruit smaller, fast offensive linemen and the highest level of HS option QBs that the big name schools don't recruit. Teams can be very successful using that. Just look at TCU. They had a great amount of success running an option oriented attack, especially early in their run. I just think spread offenses have higher upsides because 1) the highest level teams generally have too much team speed for those types of offense (one of the reasons why even very few high level teams run them anymore when in the 70s all of them ran it) and 2) if you get behind, non-pro style run offenses have very little chance to come from behind.

Are you deliberately being obtuse? How did UNT's Pro Style do vs UH's Spread the last 2 years? All I'm going to say about putting down UH. So I'll look at UH vs UH. From 1993 to 2002, UH ran a pro style offense. We went 32-79-1 although we did go to 1 bowl and won the first CUSA championship going 7-5. In those 10 years, UH wasn't ranked for 1 year. From 2003-present, UH has run a spread offense. We went 75-53, won 1 conference championship and 2 additional division championships. We went to 7 bowls and have been ranked 22 weeks including finishing in the top 20 one year. So call me a believer. Look at Baylor, the ultimate Big XII doormat with their best season having 5 wins and most seasons having 3 wins or less. Briles then comes in and implements the spread. RGIII is a great help, but even without him, last year they go 8-5 and win a bowl game, something they could old dream of prior to implementing the spread. Now on to your Bama statement: of course they're the best. They have the best talent by far. It doesn't matter what system you run, if you have the best players, you will win more consistently than without it. That's kind of the question about this thread, if you don't have the best talent, does the spread help? To help answer that question, didn't Bama lose a game last season? Who did they lose to and what style offense did they run? That would be aTm and the Spread. Do you think aTm had more talent than Bama? So what was the equalizer? How does aTm go from being 7-6 in the Big XII to 11-2 in the SEC, beating the eventual national champion, finishing in the top 10 for the first time in 20 years, and top 5 for the first time since the 1950's? New coaching staff helped. Great QB play helped. The Spread was the biggest factor. Do you think Manziel wins the Heisman as a pro style QB? Do you think he's as successful running Bama's offense? Pro Style is great for beating your talent level and worse. It's quite possible you could dominate those below you fairly consistently. But I think the Spread gives you a chance to beat those teams at a more traditional higher talent level by using alternative, less recruited high level talent.

The Spread obviously doesn't guarantee success. And yes, you have to have talent in both systems. But the type of talent required is often quite different. Schools like UH and UNT just aren't going to get 4 and 5 star OL and DLs. Meanwhile schools like OSU and Bama will fill their entire 2 deep with those types of players. OTOH those schools don't have a use for the 5'6" WR even if they have 4.3 speed, great hands, and dominate in HS. Those guys just aren't big enough to block well in a pro-style offense. So these guys with great hands and speed flourish in spread offenses when they would do nothing on a pro style team. Same thing happens with QBs. Bama doesn't want a 5'10" QB that's been playing in a spread style since junior high putting up monster number in HS. They want the 6'3" NFL prototype. That works for them. But that 5'10" QB can continue to put up monster stats in college in the spread. Need an example of the spread being effective when pro style wouldn't... look at UH vs Penn State in 2011. PSU had the #5 scoring defense/#20 total defense. Dominant DL with 3 of the 4 being drafted by the NFL. 1 of the 3 LBs drafted. What do you think the odds UH would have had against that type of defense going pro style? Maybe we could do it. Although the RBs only had 59 total yards rushing, that was on just 8 carries. But that success was more based on surprise and even backwards passes that count as rushes. I'd say our chance of winning a game like that would be slim. But using the spread, it was a pretty easy win with our tiny speedsters going crazy and those PSU lineman getting frustrated because they had little impact due to passes going out so quickly.

And we beat them by 3 TDs last season.

Are you not familiar with Bleacher Report? Wasn't Fouts listed in their ranking of FBS stadiums last season?

I don't see much difference in regions between the 2 conferences. Both of them are pretty spread out. But I believe the longest distance between schools is actually on CUSA's side. From UTEP to ODU is about 2000 miles. From UH to UConn is 1700 miles. For us western schools, we have 2 schools in TX, 1 in OK, and 1 in LA. You may throw Memphis in that group as well. Not sure how the divisions will work out in 2015 when all of the schools are added, but that's not too wide of a spread.

Typical BR brilliant reporting. AAC is a collection of leftover schools and some other conference may take some of their members so the rest will fall back into CUSA. Hasn't the AAC already had schools taken? And what happened? They took schools from CUSA, not the other way around. And CUSA is just as much a collection of leftovers that have little in common. You have schools with long histories. You have schools that have never played a single down of FBS level football. You have schools that have been ranked recently. You have schools that are perennial bottom feeders. You have schools from FBS, FCS, CUSA, Sunbelt, WAC, etc.

I don't think Rice fans care enough about football or sports in general to worry about a rivalry with anyone, including the University of Houston. Do they like to beat UH? Sure. But do they even bother to drive across town to either the UH campus or Reliant to play their "rival"? Nope. They show up a little more at Rice Stadium, but that's it.

Are conference championships the only way to judge how a team performs? MS State has finished ranked twice (as recently as 2010) and has been to bowls 5 times since 2000. ISU has been to 8 bowls since 2000. So would you prefer UNT's 4 SunBelt championships and 4 bowls or ISU's 0 Big 12 championships but 8 bowls? UNT's 4 championships or MS State's 2 top 25 finishes? And just to show I'm not being biased against UNT, as a UH fan, I actually prefer our #14 ranking in 2011 to our conference championship in 2006 where we didn't sniff the top 25 all season. There's much more prestige and respect for a top 25 ranking than there was for a CUSA championship.

It's cheese, brisket, and hot pickles wrapped in tortillas. Just not my fave. BTW: If it's the redneck thing throwing you, the place touts itself as red, white, and blue. Red neck, white trash, and blue collar.

Add me to the list of fans of Roosters. My wife and I eat there every week. Pulled Pork Nachos and Brisket Queso are great appetizers. LOVE their burgers. In addition to the previously mentioned Chez Double Bubba Burger, the Smoked Garlic Jalapeno Bacon Cheddar Burger is to die for. And if you want to get ridiculous, the Big Ass Grilled Cheese Double Burger is it. 2 burger patties between 2 grilled cheese sandwiches. Not their best tasting, but fun to talk about. While not strictly a barbecue place, they do have some very good BBQ. Love the Pit Sandwich that has brisket, pulled pork, and sausage on it. Can't decide between burger or BBQ? Get the King Brisket Burger. Burger with sliced and chopped brisket on top. One of the best fish sandwiches I've had, and one of the biggest. Great cuban sandwich. Great ribeye cheesesteak. Great BLT. Even their salads are good. How can you go wrong with a salad that has chicken fried bacon on it. My wife's favorite is the Rooster Tails which are like Blooming Onions, but I think better. Also love the fried pickles. Generally I love the weekend specials too. Some creative things like hot dogs wrapped in bacon deep fried or hot dog covered in sloppy joe meat. And you have to have a jelly jar dessert. Big props to the chocolate chip pie. Finally good, cheap drinks. I especially like the cockeyed lemonade with flavors. The only thing I can't wildly recommend is the Red Neck Sushi. It was OK, but not at the same level as the rest. OK. I've rambled on, but I love this place. Working my way through the whole menu. I've probably tried 80% of the menu items. Haven't braved the Hell Burger yet. I saw them made on Heat Seekers on the Food Network, and while I love hot foods, that's just over the top.

Doesn't negate your point though. UH has never really shown a desire to go west. I'm sure that's one of the reasons UH started out in CUSA instead of going to the WAC. Rumors have been around for years that UH could have joined the MWC. Don't know if that's true, but the rumors have been there.

Actually, UH has never been out west. Lone Star Conference (1946-1948) Gulf Coast Conference (1949-1950) Missouri Valley Conference (1951-1959) Independent (1960-1975) Southwest Conference (1976-1995) CUSA (1996-2012) When the SWC split, Rice, TCU, and SMU went west, but UH decided to be founding members of CUSA instead.

Didn't happen without pictures.

At least they stream the UNT audio. UH football game audio is not licensed to be streamed.

That's a fight between Comcast and satellite/other cable providers. They're not blacking out the games on Comcast cable, but blacking them out in most markets for everyone else. That's what happens when content carriers become content providers.

From prior UH games, Comcast cable service isn't blacked out. Just DirecTV etc in most markets.

Wouldn't be the first time that UH All Access/FirstRow didn't start broadcasting until late. One of the reasons most of us won't pay for the UH All Access stream. Too inconsistent.

Better than box score watching, but not ideal. It may be the scoreboard feed with the PA announcer. If so, you'll get a lot of Make Noise graphics. Much better than nothing though.

Just trying to be helpful. I'm not Cougar King. I don't want a nice crowd of UNT fans showing up for a watch party and be disappointed.

Have they confirmed it won't be blacked out? The TX State games was also supposed to be on CSS on DirecTV, but it was blacked out in most markets including here in the Denton area.

I challenge you to name ONE season, much less a "few times", that UH averaged 12k in CUSA. I'll help you. You won't find a season like that. The lowest was 14,986 in 2002 when we went 5-7 after a season of going 0-11. 2002 attendance was a message to UH brass that the coach needed to go after a record of 8-26 over 3 years. Heck, in 2001 when we went 0-11, we averaged 19.5K. You can argue the UT game biased that, but even without the UT game, we averaged 17k. In fact there have been only 4 GAMES since 1996 (when UH join CUSA) under 12k attendance and we've never had more than 1 game in a season under 12k. If you want to talk smack about UH attendance in the past, at least get the facts right.

I pretty much agree with everything you say here, but I'm not so sure about your hospitality point. UH has a great hospitality school. According to these 2 websites (Best Schools and Education Portal), UH is shown as a top school and UNT isn't listed. I have no idea how accurate these sites are, but I do know that UH's Hilton College is very solid.