rcade

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.

I don't think it's accurate to say everybody was behind the Dodge hire. Some people were upset that UNT hired a high school coach again. That doesn't happen at the top level of college football, and we've done it twice. (As I recall I got behind the hire pretty quick.) Dodge was a failure. He lost an unbelievable number of games in a row by 30 points and couldn't even turn things around enough to be the coach to open the new stadium. You can argue that for what we were paying nobody could succeed, but Dickey had shown that it was possible.

He isn't the most successful AD in terms of wins and losses in the major sports. The stadium and other facilities improvements aren't going away after he's gone. What form is the dire setback going to take? You can't possibly argue that firing RV will cost us wins, because he's never delivered them. Will all the big donors go away because they're too emotionally invested in RV's factory of failure?

We paid McCarney the fourth-best salary in our conference, not that far from the top compensation of $812,000. It's not a level of pay to crow about, compared to all of FBS, but it's high enough to set aside the excuse that we don't pay enough to attract anybody decent.

How much financial support do you give UNT athletics?

I hope he can make some money overseas if not here. That epic wingspan needs to be on a court somewhere.

You didn't seem concerned in the other thread where you called our beef with RV 100% vindictive, like we're all a bunch of jerks from the jerk store. I think I've read that sentiment from a dozen different people today, like we've been carrying a grudge against RV and waiting to strike until UNT paid $450,000 to a FCS team so it could beat us at home by eight touchdowns. If that's true, we're some patient aholes.

Buck up, cowpoke. Someday you'll be able to tell your grandkids you survived the Great Downvoting of 2015.

Athletes passing their classes is better than the alternative, but nobody pays a football coach $700,000 a year and the AD another $300,000 so they can show the world a good graduation rate. That kind of money is spent so that football can market the university and connect it more strongly to students and alumni. If we don't care about winning, we don't need to spend the money required to compete at our level of FBS football. McCarney's graduation rate didn't save his job with the AD. He had to win. Hold RV to the same standard.

What evidence have you seen that Smatresk and the board are aware that we're running a 28% successful football program and a lot of fans are demanding a change higher than just the coach? All I see from UNT leadership is business as usual comments and implicit support for RV.

My financial contributions to UNT athletics are zero dollars and zero cents. I will continue to give at 100% of my current level for as long as RV is AD.

If RV hires the next coach and it's another one of his "good hires," it'll cost UNT far more than that. What's the point of the great stadium and all the other facility improvements if we win 28% of our games? The point of the plan was to turn UNT football into the kind of program you'd expect at a school of 37,000 that is the biggest university in a metroplex of 6.9 million people. Instead, it's 2015 and we're still looking up with envy towards schools like Tulsa.

You changed the course of UNT football history forever with a $500 ad in the Dallas Morning News, but you don't think we can do it with a plane? Look upon our banner, Ye mighty, and despair!

Worse. I don't want RV to pick the next coach. That will extend the RV era for another five years in football.

If that was true, none of the SEC schools would ever get a coach. Living here in Florida, I can say that the fan bases are 100 times tougher on their coaches and ADs in times of adversity than Mean Green Nation has ever been. If you cultivate a fan base in the FBS and convince enough people to care, you're going to catch hell when the team stinks.

You're oversimplifying to make us seem ridiculous. I didn't expect a personal reply, but I did expect to see some signs that we're being heard. Instead, Smatresk is saying the standard things a president says before an AD hires a coach and Villarreal is talking as if his coaches have been 72-28 instead of 28-72. If Villarreal and/or Smatresk didn't want our discontent to grow, one or both could put themselves out there to make statements that (a) acknowledge the long and deep mediocrity in which our top sports are mired and (b) try to persuade fans on why the future will be different. Instead, it all sounds like it did when Dodge was fired, except now we're wasting Apogee instead of waiting to move into it.

Smatresk has been UNT president for 18 months. The McCarney firing and the decision to let RV lead the new coaching search are the first opportunity Smatresk has had to put a major stamp on our athletics program. Calling to fire him would be ridiculously premature. He still has a chance to make a difference by taking RV out of the loop on the new coach. Smatresk has time to accomplish what happened when he was president of UNLV, where the AD suddenly and unexpectedly felt the need to retire so he could spend more time with his family. We sent letters to Smatresk. Others contacted them in other ways. What did it get us? Generic replies and RV saying a bunch of things in the press that show he doesn't hear our concerns and doesn't even think there's a problem. To him, he keeps making good hires, the fault for failure lies with conditions beyond his control and fans who want a change at the top are just a "minority." When I hear him talk, I'm reminded of how much Jimmy Johnson hated excuses as Dallas Cowboys coach. Any time a coach or school official gives a reason for why UNT can't be successful, I want Jimmy and his Kip's Big Boy hair to magically appear, point to Fouts and scream "the excuses field is OVER THERE." We have Apogee now. The era of excuses is over. Nobody is doing this out of a desire to humiliate RV. That's like saying the people who booed at the end of homecoming wanted to humiliate McCarney. We're just booing a little louder, in a form college fans all over the FBS understand, in the hopes it will be heard.