oldguystudent

A man's sausage is no joking matter, be it from New York, Texas, or otherwise.

So what you're saying is that we need someone who hugs his sausage.

We would all love to have the sausage splash that comes from Earl Campbell, but we have to be realistic about our resources. They've been throwing sausage parties in Syracuse for three generations, so even if they're not from Texas, not very many can beat their meat. Besides, I hear they're very enthusiastic about going out into the Denton community and introducing people to their weiners.

This is the greatest graduate of all time.

I can't believe we've left out the most important question of all. Who's going to man the Syracuse Sausage kiosk in the new stadium? For the love of all things holy, man! We need answers!

With my extremely limited experience watching UNT football, you could pretty much put an Acme brick on the sidelines and I would fall in love with it. Man, I need to get out more!

Man! All I need is a "The cupboards are bare!" and I've got GMG Bingo!

It's so hard to judge with the teams they're playing. They were literally playing high schools last year, and have moved up to FCS this year. I asked on the sunbelt board once, but it got buried. How does their program work? How do they get to play such an odd schedule before finally moving up to full FBS membership? I recall UC Santa Barbara was forced to drop their football program in 1990 because they were playing a D2 schedule with an otherwise D1 athletic department. Does South Alabama get some sort of exemption because they're just starting the program? I've tried googling this, but I've gotten no answers.

So, this is what I see in that past two weeks with this no-good, self promoting, underqualified hack: Beat up players buying into a system and playing above their normal ability Coach going out into the streets of Denton after a tough loss and thanking people wearing green An upbeat tweet thanking the fans for the support A LOT fewer mental penalties Fans and players buying into the same approach Honest assessment in the post game Will to win Clock management After giving up the big play, the team going out and continuing to take care of business Yeah, this stuff is awful. Clearly there's still work to be done, but man, what a different team this has been. I'm still not putting my full endorsement behind Canales as permanent head coach, but his stock is definitely rising. Maybe it's just that I've only seen ONE other coach at UNT, so I have no idea how great the ancients were.

UNT showed it can play with anybody in the belt tonight.

Unless I missed something, Yahoo is wrong.

For everything a season, my friend.

Stop sassing and go to your room!

If you want an honest answer to that question, I asked that we get back to the subject at hand, tax codes, not football or national election scoreboards.

There is this little matter of weekly tax research cases for which our group typically meets on Saturdays. Depending on how negotiations go with the professor, who currently has a case assigned to us over Thanksgiving, in combination with my progress on my assigned consolidate tax return project along with other as of late very unpredictable domestic complications, the K-State game is a possibility.

Reality check. There are like 200 people in the world that care about UNT football. I'm sitting in Tax Research class last night, and the class literally gets interrupted for 30 minutes as the professor and students engage in discussion regarding the state of the Big XII. I mention that UNT won a game last weekend, and they laugh, utter a collective "pfft!" and continue on with the Big XII talk. I'm sure it would be fantastic for UNT to be battling it out with OU for the Big XII South championship, but it's not gonna happen until a lot more people care, and a lot more people aren't gonna care until there are a lot more wins on the table. Progress via stepping stones, man. UNT was at the top of the Sun Belt heap once, and stalled. Until UNT returns to that pedestal and brings several thousand check writing fans with it, it's downright delusional to be demanding performance comparisons to big AQ programs today. Go ahead and cite Boise all you want, but the reality of their program is that they've been wildly successful at all levels since their days as a junior college, steadily progressing up the ranks, and they're not fighting with bandwagon Longhorn/ATM/OU/Tech fans for support. They're battling it out with the Kibbie Dome and acres and acres of potatoes! Edit: Before someone goes and tallies the number of Mean Green club members or attendance totals, hyperbole was intended.

Nah. It'll just be two wins, against Sunbelt teams. Nothing to see here. Move along and find us a name! Current line is Troy -11.5. UNT has won but a single home game since at least the start of the 2008 season. I'm adding 6 points to UNT based on increased fan hopefulness vibes and increased player confidence and focus. This takes us to Troy -5.5. I'm now adding 5 points for Olen getting a 35+ yard field goal and actually making 2 extra points. Now we're at Troy -.5. Special teams keeping the ball in bounds on kickoffs gets us an additional 6 points. Final line, UNT -5.5. Final score: UNT 36 Troy 30.5

I would think that would depend on whether TCU wants to grow basketball or baseball. They've got quite a baseball program going out there in Ft. Worth with one of the best pitchers in the country, but as we all know, the money's in basketball. Ergo, I think they'd probably go all Big East. Edit: Actually, now that I think of it, the Mountain West is just crap for baseball, but TCU's made it work anyway. I say they go all Big East and just dominate the crap out of that conference in the spring.

Looking at past results, the W would be there, but the score sure as hell wouldn't have been 33-6. More along the lines of 79-68 with some last minute nail biting play. The difference for me wasn't a win against a crappy team. It was being in total control of the game whistle to whistle. While not perfectly executed by the players, it was nearly perfectly managed by the coaching staff.

The only thing between you and your goals is you...and your goals.

When I read all this hype about the big name hire, two people come to mind. John Robinson at UNLV and Lou Holtz at South Carolina. I remember the John Robinson hire most vividly. A four-time Rose Bowl winner and one-time national champion, Robinson was to be the savior of the stagnant UNLV football program. His best season at UNLV was his second, an 8-5 campaign with a Las Vegas Bowl win. Overall, he finished at 28-42 (.400 winning pct.) with only the one bowl appearance. Lou Holtz, in similar fashion had retired from Notre Dame with a national championship and four bowl wins that are currently in the BCS circuit along with 2 Cotton Bowl wins (then a much bigger bowl than it is now). He came into South Carolina and started off with an 0-11 campaign. He did turn it around somewhat in his 2nd and 3rd seasons with back-to-back bowl wins (in the Outback bowl. Heh. Get the pun?). He lost the momentum though and turned in three mediocre campaigns to finish out. He finished at 33-37 (.471 winning pct, .559 if we discount the first 0-11 year). While two incidents do not make a proper sampling of data, these two really stick out in my memory and tell me that any given program needs a coach that FITS its environment more than it needs the brand name. While I've expressed great hope at the win this past weekend, I'm neither endorsing nor ruling out Coach Canales at this time, but nor am I insisting on resurrecting the corpse of Knute Rockne because it'll bring in an extra 5,000 tickets for a season or two. The proper fit for this program seems to include active community involvement in Denton, a clean program both behaviorally and academically, public speaking skills, fund raising prowess and an ability to rally the players and bring out more than would be expected on the field. Rick knows damn well what's at stake in this hire. This hire, even more than the new stadium, is going to be his legacy. I imagine the risk assessment in this process will be considerably more involved than it was in 2006. Like Rick said in the podcast. This isn't Southern Miss West, and he doesn't want it to be. He, like most here at GMG, wants more. I have faith that nobody is going to put more thought and effort to bring these hopes into manifestation than Rick will.

Padlocks aren't on the list, but would probably be up to the discretion of security under the "weapons" or "not limited to" clauses.

How many people show up at Fouts on Saturday sporting padlocks hanging on chains around their necks?

There are 56 BCS teams, so 99%, or 55.44 of them are over paid. Who is the slightly more than half a coach who's taking home an honest slightly more than half day's pay for an honest slightly more than half day's work?