Greendylan

All three ranked teams that were in action tonight lost, and all three were on the road. It helps us in some small ways that two of the three winners were teams NT has beaten. But, I think the bigger lesson here is just how damn hard it is to win on the road.

I assume it's the "efficiency" factor in the NET equation that benefited from last night. That or the results of other games impacted this. Not totally sure, but it's a good question.

For the life of me, I couldn't tell you. The t-shirts had the flying worm, I guess, but I wasn't one of the lucky few who snagged one. Oh well, fun game to watch...

On the bright side, as a fan in attendance, this is excellent emotional preparation for the beatdown coming on Friday.

Sissoko with the double-double. He's rebounded really well the past couple games. Hopefully that carries over into conference play against stronger post players.

When Brock Vice came in I was eager to see what he could do in the paint, and . . . he proceeded to jack up two 3-pointers that missed. Oh well, overall I was impressed with how (relatively) polished the bench players looked in garbage time.

Great game right now between Memphis and Clemson. I'm also interested to see how Wichita State does at DePaul.

Really good points! The NIL era doesn't have to mean the end of competitive Mean Green football. There are available strategic moves that we can make, and careful roster management is one of them. Transparent crowd funding is another. If you look across the board, G5 conference teams aren't any less competitive than they were pre-NIL. NT, however, seems to be a couple years behind the learning curve, and as a result, we're one of the hardest hit by the portal each year. But, this is a fixable problem.

It's not going to be easy, and it will take innovation, persuasion, and a lot of strategic thinking--but I don't think it's fair to say "never." Also, UNT does have some advantages, such as being a massive school in a prosperous part of the country. I'm not suggesting that we should be competing with A&M in NIL dollars by next season. But, I think moving up from bottom 3 to the middle of the AAC is an attainable goal, if the fundraising efforts are done effectively and aggressively. We are not helpless in all this.

Right, but UTSA didn't either. Then they did . . . because they raised the money. I'm just saying the AD, the collectives they work with, and our alums all need to get a lot better at playing this game. It's not a static reality that we now and forever will be bottom three in the conference.

Sure, finding the billionaire who wants to make the Mean Green his passion project would be the ideal scenario. But, accruing lots of small donations from regular people is also an important piece of the puzzle--or at least is a stopgap until our AD can convince the millionaires and billionaires of DFW to get involved.

Pure speculation, but might he and others on offense have been distracted by negotiations with their new employers?

OK, but UTSA was able to keep their star QB for his final season by getting together enough NIL money to make it worth his while to stay. This isn't directed at you, but overall the sentiment among our fanbase seems to be that we don't like the idea of NIL, so we're not going to participate. Then we're shocked when we can't compete with the programs whose fans care a whole lot more. You get what you pay for, I suppose...

I honestly would be surprised if a single offensive starter with eligibility left plays in the bowl game. This is why it sucks to be playing an in-state opponent. We were always destined to be playing with the 2nd team offense and getting blown out. That was going to happen against any opponent, so doing it against a school from across the country that we don't really recruit against would at least mitigate that damage.

Yeah, but to be fair, there aren't too many bowl eligible teams that don't at least play decent football--at least in comparison to this current iteration of NT.