rcade

I'm a former Daily editor who worked there from 1988-1990, so while I like Sidway's work I won't be calling him the best ever. Mike Drago (now the Viewpoints editor at the DMN) and Brian Boney did some great sports stories back then, when Corky Nelson was football coach and we entered a season as the No. 1 ranked team in I-AA. Scott Milder also was a great sports photographer. Sadly, the biggest thing that happened in UNT football when I was running The Daily was going to Kansas State in Bill Snyder's first season as head coach and giving them their first victory in 29 games in 1989. They tore down their goalposts and I caught hell from the journalism professors for putting a photo of that on The Daily's front page. I figured if a team that beats you tears the goalposts down, that's the big photo of the game. There was also a game where SMU came to Fouts a year later and the teams brawled while leaving the field at halftime. You could see Nelson and a few other coaches throwing punches. The crowd was fired up after that, making that 14-7 win on a dreary night a sweet victory over those Omega Theta Pi bastards.

In addition to what's already been said, Sidway broke the McCarney firing on Twitter. He's one of the better sports reporters The Daily has had for a while.

Playing Army in a home and home is nice. Playing them 6 straight years is a bit much. How much excitement will the game generate in years 3-6?

It is possible to be fanatical about your alma mater's football team without your entire life revolving around it. Or so I've been told. Gotta run. My sons Jamario and Booger need help with their homework.

Good post. The main criticism against McCarney that I remember from GMG was about his winning percentage as a head coach, which was 39.7%. Some fans were afraid of bringing someone in who lost 6 out of 10 games. His winning percentage at UNT was 40.7%.

As a Floridian for 18 years now, I find a lot of similarities between UCF and UNT. Both are enormous public universities in major cities whose football programs are toiling in the shadow of multiple entrenched, well-established P5 rivals. Both recently built stadiums and developed bigger aspirations for football. Both underperform relative to the size of their alumni base and student enrollment. At 59,000 students, UCF is the second-biggest university in the U.S. Someday they're going to play like that. We've never played them. If we ever start scheduling competently, it would be nice to get them for a home and home.

This is a weird cat-and-mouse game you are imagining. I don't think any FBS program would ever sit back and wait for coaches to visit them to prove they were really interested. By the time a school official talks to a prospective coach, it would already have been made clear that person was interested in the job. His agent would have contacted the school privately to determine its interest. People he knew would've put out feelers. The same is true in the opposite direction. Nobody wants to take the PR hit of being seen going after a [job|coach] that has no chance of happening.

It's much easier for us to travel to a prospective coach without being noticed than vice versa. As for talking on Skype, this is a job that could pay $1 million a year, the way some people are talking. Would you make a hire that big without doing the interview face to face?

If a new coach comes here and finds that he's being asked to make up for deficiencies in the athletic department, I hope he has enough juice with Smatresk to go to him and demand better from the AD and his (or her) top subordinates. It has been reported that RV asked Smatresk for a public vote of confidence and didn't get one. If RV is still around after the coaching hire, maybe we'll be in a situation where the coach is more powerful than the AD and can get the support he needs in areas like marketing.

If RV hires the coach, he has been given another 3-5 years to put his stamp on the program, because that's how long a coach will likely be around even if he fails. To me, the idea of still being in the RV era of UNT athletics in 2020 is pretty grim.

If people are using the win to back RV and thumb their nose at his critics, which is exactly what happened, that's going to draw a response.

That truck is UTSA colors. No wonder he likes RV. Frenchy's a sleeper agent for our bitter three-year rival.

I post about football. I post about basketball. I post about RV. I'm a triple threat, like Johnny Quinn.

So you're not posting about football because we're not posting about football even though we're posting about football? I'm just spitballing here, and this might sound like crazy talk, but it's so crazy it just might work: Maybe you should post about football.

This is a great win even if the rest of the season does not turn out well, but I hope it's a sign of things to come. UNT played so well that Oklahoma and its coach couldn't believe it. She was completely rattled on the post-game telecast. As for the people who are using this to say "I told you so," it's no wonder you back RV: You are the most easily satisfied sports fans on the planet. Even a single day of good news is enough for you to forget 10 years of bad.

We've discussed plenty of football on Saturdays, on the board and in the chat room. There are prediction threads, live blogs, and post mortems. Did you post in any of them this month?

I definitely miss Derek Football.

Wahoo!

Dodge was only in his second year as UNT head coach when the student athletic fee was passed and plans for a new stadium began. I think this reduced the amount of criticism that Dodge might have received otherwise as the losses continued to pile up. It also kept RV from facing the kind of criticism he's facing today over a failed football hire. Even with all the losses in the third and fourth Dodge seasons, I think there was some disappointment that he wouldn't open Apogee. We were invested in the optimistic vision that was present when Dodge was still a new coach and our stadium was being built.

Schools manage to fire ADs all the time. If Smatresk wanted new leadership in athletics but couldn't fire RV right away, he could do what FSU did with AD Randy Spetman in 2013. They created a new job called "senior adviser to the athletics department" and parked him there until his contract expired. Based on this link, RV's contract expires in 15 months on Feb. 28, 2017: http://www.gomeangreen.com/forums/topic/72839-unt-ad-rick-villarreal-contract-details-drc/

That's quite a melodramatic word you're using to describe our banner. Would you say people who called for McCarney's firing were trying to injure him? Coaches and ADs are hired to be fired. They are paid big bucks in an extremely visible part of the university -- Villarreal's $382K a year makes him one of the five highest paid employees of the school -- and this invites a high level of public scrutiny. In his 14 years at UNT he has undoubtedly seen other ADs who were the subject of a firing campaign. It shouldn't be a surprise to him that it's happening here. RV didn't worry about McCarney's feelings when he fired him for poor job performance. We shouldn't worry either when calling for RV's job.

Until the new football coach is hired, we have a chance to convince Smatresk to fire RV, park him in a non-AD position until his contract is up or keep RV away from the hiring decision. You're asking us to give up before the fight is over.

Yep. I admire UNT for wanting to express solidarity with France, but the people involved in social media should've found another way to do it.

Can you name a single college baseball player currently playing in Texas? I want baseball at UNT, but it would hardly be a replacement for football in terms of the attention it gets in the sports world.

There was some awkwardness in how UNT announced that it had lit the tower green in solidarity with the people of France. Some people are upset that they also said it was for a UNT volleyball win over UTSA: https://twitter.com/OnlyAtUNT/status/665736019153543168