rcade

I want everyone associated with UNT athletics, the school president and the Board of Regents to sign a pledge: "If I ever say it is tough to recruit at North Texas, that comment can be taken as my immediate resignation."

I should've put money on that. The banner plane would be a squadron. ;-). Jeffrey Wilson gaining 138 yards on 17 carries was pretty good, but I don't think that was what kept their scoring down. Our defense got bigger and meaner at halftime.

Horrible tragedy. The crash happened at 10:31 a.m. She looks drunk in the mugshot. How is somebody getting blotto at that hour?

If you think the coaching hire will be made with urgency, your process would still be going on when RV announced the new coach and set us on his path for another 3-5 years. We need as many fans as possible contacting Smatresk to say they're ready for a change at AD. That requires a public campaign that can reach as many people as possible who care about Mean Green football. I did contact Smatresk. I got a generic response about my mail being received. He then made public comments that made it sound like he's committed to business as usual and RV made a bunch of public comments that showed zero recognition of our problems and dismissed his critics as a "minority." It didn't seem like complaints like mine were being heard.

We had to destroy Mean Green Village in order to save it.

Then what is the way to get a positive result? Let RV pick a third coach, start giving money again and hope really really hard?

Marshall's a 27-point favorite with a 59 over/under, from an odds site I just checked. But the weather looks rainy. I'm going to be bold and predict an almost respectable 30-13 loss with some nice running stats for the Mean Green.

Rick Villarreal has made around $3 million dollars in salary during a decade in which our football team won 31% of its games, putting us in the bottom 10 of all FBS schools over that period. That's a lot of money. Why do you think he's paid so much? He's expected to deliver a product in football and basketball that successfully markets the university. It is not a personal attack to call in public for one of the university's best-compensated employees to be accountable for poor job performance after 14 years on the job. Smatresk has replaced an AD as a university president. He's unlikely to view a "Fire Rick Villarreal" banner in personal terms. He will assess Villarreal in business terms. If he decided to stick it to disgruntled fans by keeping Villarreal, it would be an act of self-destruction. The failure in revenue sports will become an albatross around his neck too.

Our efforts to become Texas State occurred long before our name change to UNT in 1988. Texas State pulled it off by first becoming Texas State-San Marcos in 2003. They had to know a lot of people would just call them Texas State, and in 2013 this helped them persuade the state lege to let them drop the "San Marcos." It's a brilliant bit of marketing that will pay dividends for them for many decades. In the 1970s and earlier, several Texas schools wanted to become Texas State, according to this story by historian Michael Phillips (a friend of mine, coincidentally). He mentions the desire to become "Texas State" in an article about how the Texas A&M University name change in 1963 was received on that campus: http://jmichaelphillips.blogspot.com/2012/01/earl-rudder-and-era-of-radical-change.html At this point, the North Texas region is more populous than 33 states and DFW is the largest metropolitan area in the South (fourth largest in the U.S.). Being the largest public school in an area this big and economically powerful, and having the name University of North Texas, is an enormous asset.

Bingo. It is stating the obvious that banner donors and most GMG diehards are not writing six- or seven-figure checks to influence UNT athletics. If we had that kind of money to buy us a big voice on campus, we wouldn't be complaining here. We'd be having a private come-to-Jesus meeting with RV and President Smatresk about how our money has bought us a ceaseless series of Saturday ass-whippings. But people who think average fans don't matter should never complain about attendance. Average fans can collectively contribute a lot of money, and you can't fill a stadium with just 17 big donors.

The wider college football world will stop calling us North Texas State when we put a winning team on the field that makes a strong impression on them.

I think a large majority of UNT fans want a change at AD. The poll here was 93% in favor of firing Rick Villarreal, the banner was funded in around 30 hours, fan attendance has plummeted, the Mean Green Club membership level is dismal and there's no one on GoMeanGreen or anywhere else making a positive argument for Villarreal's performance on the field in football or basketball. Many of the people who oppose the banner concede that they are not Villarreal supporters. They just don't like the tactic because mean people suck. Even the Denton Record-Chronicle and UNT beat writer Brett Vito have become openly critical of the dismal state of our revenue sports under Villarreal. You're not making a positive argument for Villarreal either. Instead, you're attacking a group of longtime fans for trying something out of sheer desperation. Half the time you post ridicule that our efforts are puny and will amount to nothing. The other half you beg us to stop because we could cause dire consequences forever. Make up your mind.

That's not how buyouts work in athletics. The buyout is for McCarney's future money owed to him in 2016, 2017 and 2018. He's not getting it in a lump sum now -- it's still going to be paid over time. One of the terms is that we owe him less if he takes another coaching job, based on what that job pays. That's another reason we wouldn't pay him it all up front.

A lot of fans are going to see the banner who don't read GMG and don't read the media outlets that have written about it. Assuming that the number of people still going to games this year can accurately be described with the word "lot."

Can you name a single FBS school that has an independent fan organization with actual power? UNT leaders could be as deaf to your hypothetical Not the Mean Green Booster Club as they are to fans speaking out today.

I hope you're right because I'd like to see these players achieve some success (and our giant freshman class to see its first win), but our defense is giving up basketball scores. That puts a lot of pressure on an offense which is still a work in progress.

We schedule cupcakes and they hang 66-7 on us. At the moment we're not capable of beating a 5-2 Georgia Southern. We were steamrolled by the 25th best team in the FCS. Over 50 FCS teams are higher than us in the Sagarin rankings.

If one win was all it took to make things right in Mean Green Nation, the banner campaign would have zero donors.

Calling for patience equals doing the exact same thing we've been doing for years and expecting different results. RV will pick a coach and lock us into 3-5 more years of his approach to football. If you don't think this is the right time to change the AD, when would be the right time? The new coach will get the same honeymoon period McCarney did, so no one will be expecting RV's hire to produce results for several years. So the next time RV gets graded on football performance will be if that coach is fired. But hiring a new AD when the coach has just been fired is too hasty, right? There comes a point when counseling patience is acceptance of mediocrity. We've reached it with RV.

My reasonable expectation is that Smatresk would respond to complaints and the historic awfulness of the football team by showing that he knows there's a deep problem. That doesn't have to be sent to me personally, but it should be communicated to fans and alumni in some form. I also expected that Smatresk would not sit idly by while RV gives a self-assessment of himself and the program in interviews that borders on the delusional. Nor should he have been allowed to publicly dismiss angry fans as a "minority." As for the notion that we shouldn't fire an AD now, if it doesn't happen now RV hires the next coach and sets UNT on a path for 3-5 more years of the same. You down for that? I'm not.

Here's a ranking of FBS college football programs by wins the past decade (excluding this season): http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin/records/calc-wp.pl?start=2004&end=2014&rpct=30&min=5&ss=on&se=on&by=Wins UNT is 111th out of 119 teams with a 42-90 record (31.8%). Around 10 schools still paying $500,000 or less in yearly coaching salary have done appreciably better than us in wins over that span, most notably Northern Illinois (95-50), Toledo (78-59) and Bowling Green (73-65). The team with the best winning percentage over that span, Boise State, was our conference mate in 2000 in the Big West.

True. But when we hired Dodge it only had happened three times before: Faust, Bob Commings at Iowa and Dennis Parker at UNT. Last year, UNLV made it five: http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/writer/dennis-dodd/24881535/unlvs-hiring-of-prep-coach-could-make-history-good-or-bad

Dodge didn't help build the stadium with anything his teams did on the field. He was just the new coach who benefited from a fan base willing to greet his arrival with optimism. Any coach we hired would likely have sparked the same sentiment during his honeymoon period. Grading RV only since the stadium is weak. There are ADs who still don't have facilities like ours that win far more in football and basketball than we have under RV.

I wouldn't call it half-cocked to decide 5 years ago that McCarney was a make-or-break hire for RV. Your idea that no AD should be replaced until there's already another waiting in the wings is a bit ridiculous. RV didn't have a coach waiting in the wings when he fired McCarney.

You're tilting at windmills while this program is in the state it's in.