oldguystudent

Win games. Worry about music, shirts, shoes, handbags, hand signs, hand jobs, the WAC, the BIG 12, the Little Engine that Could, flags, anthems, pageantry, and Tasty's Baklava later. Right now, win games.

And that's good enough for another four years and lots of warm fuzzies, yes? Opening game is a conference game, so anything could happen.

I am near certain that they will indeed drop the balls in them.

Well, with this new stadium, there is no place like home!

A +1 for you, fine sir. That made me laugh.

I'm sorry, did you say something? I was busy tending to my mangled ring finger after a long afternoon of smacking my kid around. She told me the shoes were black, and I was forced to teach her that they are indeed green.

The black makes perfect sense. They make the statement that I can do battle on the gridiron and hit the formal soiree later that night without a change of footwear!

You know I posted this specifically for you, sweetheart. Mwah!

I have bought one ticket for UNT football in my life, in 2008. Remembering that experience, how much are the ticket printing fees, the pulling the ticket from the printer fees, the tearing of the preforated edge fees, the placing the tickets in the envelope fees, the hand delivery of the tickets across the counter fees and the calculation of fees fees? (I don't indict UNT or the AD in this. 'Tis merely the nature of modern ticket purchasing)

We've covered the helmet. The pants. The shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the shoes! I, for one, say they're fabulous, and could discuss them for the duration of the summer! Now all that's left is to see if Nike has provided the players with new backpacks for road games.

And the other thing to consider is that 2008 was probably an outlier across the board for corporate profits. A more accurate picture of this would probably be to go back, say ten years and see what corporate profits across a random sampling of companies for each year was then trend out the annual increases to smooth out years like 2008. As an aside, it's a pet peeve of mine when I read "XYZ Corp paid NO taxes in 2010 but made a profit of $XX billion!" Nice sound bites, but nobody's looking at loss carryovers from 2008 that are going to provide tax benefits for years to come. Mmmm...M-3 Reconciliations. Learn them! Read them! Love them!

This idea piqued my curiosity. Going with the assumption that when n>30, the confidence level is 90%, I chose the 30 most actively traded stocks as of the close of trading Monday and looked at net income before adjustments for preferred stock for each. In sum, those companies made profits of $45 billion in 2008 and $141 billion in 2010, an increase of 209%. The valid criticism in this is that my 30 companies were not necessarily chosen at random. I need to come up with a way to get a more random sampling of companies and see if this trend holds true. I was considering just watching the ticker and writing down the next 30 symbols that came across, but I still don't know if that would be TastyGreek approved random sampling or not. As for employee wages, I just don't even know where to begin to look for data that would debunk or validate the claims of stagnant wages. For that I can only provide anecdotal evidence, and that in no way represents a true distribution of wages.

Just to make UNT90 happy, I'd like to point out that those Nike shoes are fabulous. There. We've talked about shoes now. There is no further we can take this.

Man, I had to do that. My grandpa would give me the pocketknife, and I'd have to cut my own. Oddly, one of my fondest childhood memories. I guess that explains a lot about my adult....oh. I'll stop there. TMI and whatnot.

I see now that I've been doing it wrong this whole time! Thank you for enlightening me, fine sir!

I believe for the past few years, it's been the Kinder, Gentler Green.

You laugh, but let me try to explain what it's like. I recall going to a baseball tournament at Baylor a couple years ago. During the night game, under the stadium lights, I asked my daughter why she thought it might be that Baylor was wearing black jerseys. She tilted her head, "Um. Dad. They're yellow." I walked down the steps to get closer to the field. BAM! Instant bright gold jerseys! Walk back up to my seats, black again. I'm a real fun ride at traffic lights. Let me tell you. In other words, unless some person is going to buy UNT stuff for me, I will NEVER have the correct shade of green, because to me they're ALL THE SAME!

It's Nike. Won't they pretty much change every game now?

I'm pretty color blind so I can't tell if that's green or turquoise or purple*, but I like it. I don't usually like the jersey and the pants being the same color, but this looks good to me. *Hence my particular aversion to people telling me I have the wrong green on.

I agree that I don't think price is the issue. I wanted to come see UNT football as a casual fan five or six years ago, but I found the process of finding tickets/parking etc. to be...not user friendly. Everything on the website back then was geared directly at mean green club members, and I clearly wasn't part of that. So I gave up. Then, when I showed up for my first game with a student ID, I didn't know what to do with myself, where to go before the game, how to park, how to tailgate, where to buy tickets for my daughter, or how I would be able to sit next to her with my student ticket and her regular ticket. All these things are supposed to be part of the experience of college football, but all I found as a casual stranger were these secret wristband societies who told me I wasn't welcome. It took actively coming here to gmg.com to find out how things work. Now maybe I'm just a lot less intelligent than your average football watching bear, but had I never become affiliated with UNT, I would've found it far too much trouble than it was worth. If anything, the ticket office, once gaining exposure in the community, needs to have printed materials that are much more clear for the novice fan on how things work. Then, on game day, there should be UNT ambassadors in the parking lots and in the stadium showing new fans around, explaining everything, and maybe gently guiding them to the team store if needed. Then do the ole', "Apply today's game ticket towards your season ticket purchase!" routine. Round 'em up, show 'em the ropes, and keep 'em in! Thos are my two cents, but since all I have is a nickel, I'll need some change, please.

We need more fans! But they can't have what I have! And they must wear what I wear! But they can't sit next to me! And they'd better cheer like I cheer! Or they can just GTFO! But we need more fans! Lots of small pond, big fish syndrome around here. Growth. It's good for business.

Win games in Denton. Take care of internal business. Win more games in Denton. Stop peering over the fences of other conferences. It's completely inconsequential because if they're not the WAC, they are not peering back until there are more wins in Denton.

UCSB, a school to which I have no affiliation whatsoever, used to throw tortillas at their basketball games. When UNT was in the Big West and played UCSB, did you throw tortillas at each other?

If they win six, and you're optimistic, then they gotta win 7. Bowl!

De...fense? What is this strange and foreign topic of which you speak?