rcade

At North Texas, we've heard it all the time. It should be translated into Latin and incorporated into the school's seal.

You make it sound like the Big West. The Sun Belt in football stretches from Texas to Florida, the football-rich southeast with the best TV game times for DFW viewers. We've got two conference foes in Louisiana and one in Arkansas, and could get teams likle Louisiana Tech and Texas State in the future. If this conference can put together two or three solid mid-major programs, it is in a better position than some of the conferences people keep hoping we will join. I expect I'm in the minority, but I think it's better to stick around.

Teams in the Sun Belt (and their fans) should spend more time building up the Belt and less time looking for the exits. One of the reasons North Texas has so little football tradition is because we keep moving conferences. The Belt is built the way a mid-major needs to be built -- it's regional and it has a marquee location for its bowl game. Give these teams another 5-10 years together, and we'll all have fans who are excited to have conference rivals coming to town. I'd rather see UNT stick with the Belt than go to another mid-major.

I thought that was funny too. Can you imagine how much worse the taunts would be if they beat us twice?

I don't see Troy going into Georgia this year and doing any better than it did in Little Rock or Gainesville. It's a good Sun Belt team, but they will be facing a good SEC team in its house. So North Texas is a tee ball team? That explains the everybody-gets-a-trophy mentality so many UNT fans are exhibiting this weekend. Sheesh. Let's all close our eyes and pretend that winning in the future means pretending really, really hard that the present season isn't a disaster.

The main houses I'm referring to are the buildings in the south end zone, to the east of the baseball field. They look odd, though I thought it was kinda cool that NCAA Football 08 includes them in that Movie Gallery commercial where your coach plays the game. Though it's true that what goes on inside the stadium is what matters, have you ever been to a storied football stadium like Death Valley in Clemson? It's got such epic scale you expect lions and Christians to come out.

It ain't even close. UCF is in northern Orlando at least 60 miles north of USF in Tampa.

North Texas has never done well in recruiting. I thought we'd get a boost from four straight Sun Belt titles and a bowl victory, but what we're seeing today suggests that it hasn't been the case. Kids don't grow up with North Texas in their heads as a place they'd like to play ball. This got me wondering about what you could do to change that. What could you do to turn a kid's head about the Mean Green when he's 8-12? One thing is to make sure that every youth league team in the Metroplex that calls itself the Mean Green gets Mean Green gear for themselves and athletic supplies for the league. Word will get around. Another is more unorthodox. Take UNT's game video and chop it up into small 1-3 minute videos that show individual players doing something great. Publish them on YouTube, and give them to players with their own MySpace or Facebook pages. I've seen the pages of several UNT players, and they put some of their own highlights up. The Mighty Quinn has some nice shots of his UNT days, running for a touchdown with defenders getting left in the dust. Encourage players to use this stuff. Give it to RATV students and music students to remix and put on their own sites. Anyone else have any ideas? By the time a player is old enough and good enough to get Coach Dodge's call, he's already got an impression of North Texas in his head. One of the reasons Southlake Carroll became a high school powerhouse is that they made youngsters want to grow up to be Dragons. I think UNT has to get creative for that to happen with the Mean Green.

Losing to Troy is not a surprise. Fielding a team that had no hope to beat Troy is a surprise.

To answer the Troy fan's question, the luxury box side of Movie Gallery Stadium looked good on TV, but the other side and the end zones not so much. In the end zones you could see buildings that looked like houses, power lines and the like. I like college stadiums that are more closed-in. Put some walls, trees or new buildings around that sucker and crank the stadium lights up to 11.

We led in time of possession because Troy had six touchdown drives in which the longest drive took 1 minute and 47 seconds. I'm all for finding the silver lining in dark clouds, but I feel like channeling Jimmy Johnson. We're leading our conference in excuses.

Me too. We don't get draft picks for sucking, and every single recruit Dodge talks to in the off-season will know about this stinkbomb of a season. We need some wins.

In what area, MeanGreenBuzz?

I'd accept the retooling excuse if we were seeing improvement in any aspect of the game. We're not. And if it doesn't start happening soon, why expect next season to be any better? Recruiting only goes so far.

We won the opening toss.

This is what we've come to -- making excuses for being steamrolled by Sun Belt teams? North Texas fans already have the lowest expectations in the Bowl Playoff Subdivision when it comes to out-of-conference games. If we start to accept this kind of loss within the Belt, which is still the worst conference in the subdivision, we're doomed. I did not expect Coach Dodge to put a team out there that performs like this. I'm still holding on to some optimism about the long-term plan here, but he needs to look a lot harder at his coaching staff. These players are better than what we're seeing.

This is ridiculous. The excuse that Coach Dodge doesn't have his players here yet isn't big enough to cover a Sun Belt team beating you like it was a paycheck game.

Thanks for posting here and giving us a coach's perspective, RamoneArchie.

I watched the play a dozen times, thanks to TiVo. One or two bad tackles, then it's all Fitzgerald and one great block that knocked a certain tackler into the stands. Stop being an Eeyore, Travis. That play was North Texas greatness, not UL-Pick 'Em sorriness.

It's detailed in a five-page thread that has been closed. Bringing it up here would just be reopening it.

Ya were here, Travis. You dismissed one of the greatest offensive plays in UNT history as bad tackling. How many Warhawks missed? I saw maybe one or two. The rest was good blocking and football speed.

It may be the case that Dodge and Mendoza have such a strong working relationship that it's no big deal to have a heated discussion. Mendoza's coached for him the past seven years. Some people can get in each other's faces and still work well together. My brother-in-law is a dot-com exec who works that way. He ends up with a team around him who can take it.

Reread the cutline. It says the coaches "exchanged words."

That doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, DD, considering the fact that Rick isn't one of the people ripping the hell out of the coaches on GoMeanGreen. He confronted the wrong person. Like a lot of the defense the first couple games, the coach missed his assignment.

And "The Block." Brock Stickler knocked a tackler into the stands about 30 yards upfield, right before he was going to knock Fitzgerald out of bounds. The teamwork on that play was great stuff. Jamario was in full sprint, all the way down the field, in case Fitzgerald needed another block.