rcade

Forget the goal posts. That's kid stuff. If UNT wins I'm going to flip over my own car and set my trash cans on fire.

Did you read any of those stories? Here's one. The Florida AD, Jeremy Foley, told Zook to go to the fraternity to "avert a possible altercation between a group of football players and fraternity members." Sounds like he didn't handle it very well, but he's not like that Iowa basketball coach who was partying hard with students.

That our rivals in the Sun Belt are weaker than I thought. At this point in the season, given our performance, I think our chances of winning another New Orleans Bowl against a decent OOC team are slim. I'm not a Dickey basher. I'm not unhappy with being in the Belt. But let's not kid ourselves about this year's team.

I disagree. The travel costs and TV times for a West Coast conference were damaging the program, as the Big West years proved. The Sun Belt has the right geography for UNT.

This year's performance on defense makes me wonder if that's true.

I'm not a Dickey basher, but I would take Ron Zook over him. I live in St. Augustine, Florida, and hear about Gators football all day long. Zook was an average SEC coach, one of the best recruiters in I-A, and a tireless advocate for the program. Zook would immediately be the biggest name in the Sun Belt and draw a lot of national attention to the program. He recruited more Parade All-Americans than Spurrier did at Florida. Obviously, he wouldn't have that kind of success at UNT, but I believe he could outrecruit the rest of the Belt. As a public face for your program, Zook would completely outclass Dickey. Zook was all over the place here, speaking to alumni groups and the sports media. Though he was at best an average in-game coach and coordinator in the SEC, with a penchant for losing games in the fourth quarter, I think average coaching in that conference would probably be above average in the Belt.

I'm trying to jump on the basketball bandwagon after years of paying attention only to football. During all of the conference shuffling talk, it seemed to me that we would've been a much stronger player with a solid basketball program.

If I recall correctly, an athlete can transfer to I-AA and play immediately instead of being forced to sit out an entire year.

Athletes transfer all the time when they lose their starting position. If Andrew Smith was leaving, which I hope is not true, it seems silly to place any of the blame on fans posting messages here. Besides, if any player on North Texas was so delicate he could be driven away from the school because of a message board, would you really want that guy leading your team?

I don't think my school, the great Lloyd V. Berkner, ever had glory days.

That's one ugly jersey. Apparently, AAC is stuffed to the rafters with merchandise that features it, from what I've heard.

You sure got me pegged. In fact, I hired the guy to ride in the back of Smith's truck, and I told him to discharge the firearm in the air. I even tricked Smith into fleeing the scene -- I told him there was a sale on Booger Kennedy bobblehead dolls at Voortmans. I live in Florida, where every year you can count on a few student athletes from Florida, FSU, and Miami getting into trouble with the law (or worse). Attitudes like yours contribute to it -- many fans here will either whitewash or refuse to believe any evidence that a player with on-the-field talent might be an off-the-field idiot. A standard part of a college coach's spiel is to tell parents he will look after the welfare of his players. That's all I'm suggesting here -- Coach Dickey and the athletic department have a responsibility to make sure everything's on the level with this incident, and whether we hear about it or not, I hope they're taking care of business.

On one level, sure. A person accused of a crime should be presumed innocent. However, people who have influence over Smith -- coaches, peers, the school -- should look into what happened for his sake as much as their own. As a general rule, I think it's fair to say that most student athletes who are involved in an incident with guns and police are not completely innocent. If this was one of those cases, I would expect the athletic department to find that out, rather than accepting at face value whatever the police were told that night.

Perhaps, but the athletic department should be asking them too. That Bernard Jackson post shows why -- I'd hate to see another story like that unfold at UNT.

I think we're too quick to assume Andrew Smith is completely innocent in all of this. First, I'm reminded of Greg Williams' rule that nothing good can happen to an athlete from being out and about at 3 a.m. Second, Smith was driving a truck in which someone pointed a gun at police and fired several shots in the air. That's a big deal -- everyone in the truck could've easily ended up dead, and people die every New Years from idiots who fire guns into the sky. More questions need to be asked about who the guy was, how Smith knew him, whether he knew about the gun, and why he left the scene and came back without the man.