untjim1995

BG, you got treated like we do when have to go play the P5 whore game...you tried, but in the end, you probably knew yourself how this was gonna turn out.

I think the thing most of us who have been around for over 20+ years can attest to is that expecting big fan support ever here isn't a good bet. We think averaging 20k for season attendance is good--and it is for us. But that's the rub--we have 200k alumni near here, plus 36k students, a town with about 100k in and around it, and a media market that has millions living within an hour of this place...and 20k is a damn good average for us. It's just a tough sell here, for all of the reasons we all know. At some point, you just have to decide to accept it and just follow the team, knowing full well that you'll be in the 2% of the UNT Family that gives a rip about our sports teams.

It's almost as if you're saying a terrible opponent and a bad start time that isn't from any other reason other than the AD's planning doesn't hurt the Apathy Monster... In defense of the Green Brigade, baking for three straight hours before the sun goes down in 90+ degree weather would make me wear anything I could to just stay comfortable...I'm sure the Director of the Green Brigade would also much prefer a 7:30 kickoff for his kids, too.

And the huge issue here is that non-diehards don't want to go watch Lamar or any other FCS spare play here. Its blazing hot at that time of the year and football fans in this area aren't going to skip watching Alabama and Florida State play in a neutral site game from the comfort of their homes. Hell, it isn't even just with FCS spares. Back in 2013, a very good Ball State team played here in an afternoon game that we came back and won, in front of about 12k butts in seats. Meanwhile, A&M and Bama are playing each other in a top five matchup and non-diehards aren't gonna be swayed to go watch us play OOC games against teams that nobody cares about. RV screwed us royally with the games against Nicholls State, Portland State, Bethune-Cookman, Lamar, Rhode Island, Incarnate Word, and Houston Baptist. Those games don't help you at all with the problems you have. You win against Nicholls State by 70, it doesn't help you beat anyone else. You lose to Portland State by 50+ on Homecoming, your reputation and program are immediately destroyed and the rebuilding has to start over. These FCS spares don't help us--maybe they do other programs, but not us. And we built Apogee with the promise that it would bring in better OOC opponents than we got at Fouts, not worse...

Completely agree. Freshman Jamario is the best UNT player I've ever seen.

The argument is still about music/arts/low cost for tuition being the primary window over athletics. Nothing you've noted has changed that point.

Matt Simon had the fire for the job, but the job HERE just drove him insane--literally, the dude went crazy. When he got fired, he accused everybody in town of being racist and against him from day one, when it was fairly obvious that wasn't even close to true. What he wanted, he couldn't have, which was a school that wanted to invest in resources and facilities. He never even complained once about the schedules that we gave him to play, which in 1995 was the toughest single year our program has ever scheduled in football. We played 3 homes games at Fouts, with 2 of them being I-aa schools and the other was Oregon State, who we beat on a last second TD. We played and lost to KU at Texas Stadium, which with true UNT luck, happened to just be one of the three times in about the last 30 years that KU finished with a top 10 team. The other games played on the road: @ Mizzou, @ Oklahoma, @Nevada, @ Alabama, @LSU, @ UNLV, and @ Louisville. That we fininshed 2-9 was damn near miraculous. His next team, in its first year in the Big West, went 5-6, and then in 1997, we won at Texas Tech and gave a top ten ranked A&M squad a game for about 3 quarters. Simon looked ready to take our team to the next level, but then we got into Big West play and the team just had a severe letdown after playing the Texas Big 12 schools and basically crashed down to earth against the BW schools. We finished 4-7 and he got fired by Helwig, who immediately hired his old KSU buddy's son, the current OC at SMU, Darrell Dickey. And that was it for Matt Simon, a guy who had so much potential, but let his conspiracies and his anger get the best of him. He really could have done great things here with the right mindset, our current leadership and facilities of the day, and our current conference affiliation.

Its the dead-on truth...name the other regional FBS school that uses music and fine arts as its primary window to advertise the university ahead of its sports teams? Go ahead, we'll wait...

I'm afraid to ask why, but why did we have red in any part of a band uniform for a school with Green and White as its colors?

The people to go after are the folks who need Texas ties in a bad way. Mizzou, Colorado, even Nebraska are solid targets within the P5 realm, as are teams like Utah, Arizona or Arizona State. That Pac 12 non-Cali schools could use a game here for recruiting, especially the ones I just mentioned. But the biggest win we could possibly get is a series with Okie State, just to give them another game each year in the DFW area, since they play both Baylor and TCU at home and away in the same season, like we do with UTEP and UTSA currently.

Culture change happens in two ways...it either takes decades to do or it takes an amazing event that transforms that culture. For us, it would take football basically going undefeated, like Western Michigan just did, and going to a BCS bowl game.

I still say we get 6 wins out of this schedule. Sure wins are Lamar and UAB. We will win 4 games out of this combination of UTEP, UTSA, Army, ODU, @Rice, and @ FAU. I don't see us winning @SMU, @ Iowa, @ La Tech, or @ USM.

It will turn into that if the G5s don't bring anyone--but its courtesy now and the school doesn't really care who pays full price for a ticket, as long as the allotment is used. I don't see that changing anytime soon. These P5 giants just want a team that they can devour in front of an adoring fan base, especially if it helps them get some bench players some experience or helps the lower P5s to get bowl eligible.

Those schools are mega-football factories. Its always going to be en vogue to go to games at those places listed. Here's where you are right, though, while comparing us to other schools. La Tech, UTSA, UTEP, USM, Arky State, ULL, MUTS, WKU, Marshall, etc...sports, ESPECIALLY FOOTBALL, are the main windows to their university and it is THE priority of their university's marketing resources to advertise their school. Ours is music, fine arts, and cheap tuition--always has been, always will be. The only way we even can see our football program move up in that pecking order would be to see us win over several years, which included several CUSA Divisional and Conference titles, as well as spot in a BCS Bowl game. Otherwise, as we have continually seen for umpteen years now, the primary window will never be on athletics. The faction that is against it, overall, within the UNT Family and in Denton is just too vast. TBH, its almost miraculous that we average around 20k for announced attendance with what we roll out there most seasons these days. We all certainly know that we don't have that many butts in seats. Could winning cure this? Hopefully...but its gonna take 3 or more years of constant winning to even give us a chance. And even then, as we saw with the SBC Championship run from 2001-2004, that is not a given. The alumni turn out for big games or big name opponents (i.e. bowl games or decent competition). Otherwise, its usually about 12-17K in actual attendance every game against SBCUSA teams and FCS spares.

Southern Miss had the same slogan for years, too. You schedule teams that people want to see in OOC. SMU, UH, Indiana, and Army are fine examples of this. Liberty, Idaho, and FCS spares are not. If you actually believe that you shouldn't host somebody at your place out of fear you'll get killed, you might as well just go down to FCS and just be content to play FBS games as your money grab. If we cannot beat Texas Tech, Memphis, or Houston in the coming years at Apogee, so be it. The funds you make off of those games and the media coverage you get is gigantic compared to FCS spares and Idaho or Liberty. This thread is example one of just how low the expectations are around here. If you prefer to see us play a spare at home because its winnable, you've basically told everybody that you don't believe we can ever be anything close to what USM or La Tech have achieved in the last few decades. Sadly, you're probably right with attitudes like this. All I know is that I've seen Troy beat Mizzou and Okie Lite at home. I've seen UTSA compete well with Arizona and Arizona State at home. I've seen us compete well with Kansas State at home in the past. What I have yet to see in the last 15 years is us come close to beating a Power team on the road. And I don't see this happening in the coming years ahead, either.

Big deal--we got Lamar here...///RV

Totally agree. It's just a matter of when. I suspect that the NCAA will still be the governing body for them to protect against antitrust lawsuits for the Powet Conferences and the Upper G5s, which are the AAC and MWC. The rest of us are just going to be playing in a lower level. For all of you who believe the MWC isn't worth it, when it comes down to being included in the top level of football instead of a lower level, this will be what you chose.

UTSA has a local media that promotes them and cares about them. We don't. UTSA plays in the middle of a destination market that others want to come and play in for recruiting. We don't. UTSA hasn't ever dropped down a level in football, causing generations of alumni and potential fans to abandon ship. We have. UTSA doesn't have to worry about its standing with TX HS football coaches and parents of recruits. We do. Thats your differences...until shown otherwise, we are well behind them right now as a program. We are 1-3 against them, with the one win being a miracle. They had a plan right away to thrive at this level. It's worked well so far for them. We are still trying to figure out what to do.

Hearing people bitch about losing to uTSA reminds me of people here that refused to believe we were not going to get beat by Belt teams in the years after the SBC title run ended in 2004. We miraculously beat them once--because their 5th string QB had to play in the second half of our game here in 2015. Right now, they are just better than us. I give us a fighting chance of winning against them this season only because we are playing them in Denton. I still think we get 6 wins against this schedule. If we win 5, that's ok. But anything less than 4 probably means we are in for a long tenure of having SL here because of that contract extension.

Quite simply, the only school where RV would have been allowed to be the AD after the Dodge Debacle and the Bumford Bungling was sadly here. RV was genius in one simple way--he knew what he had to do to keep his job and he did it. The BOR said to stay in budget and don't make a stink about it publically. Then, when he knew he needed extra funds, he got the UNT 17 to fund the extra stuff while selling them on "access", as if it was the exact same thing that their Aggie and Longhorn buddies couldn't do for their higher donations. And those 17 helped further insulate RV's job security until the 2014-2016 calendar years saw us have to buy out two contracts, including Mac's $2.1 million buyout. Then, it just became clear that Benford was never going to turn anything around and Smatresk just could not keep him around with that poor of a record of hiring coaches and little substance on season tickets or attendance. Add in scheduling FCS spares to play at the brand new stadium that only passed because he was basically told to stay away from the stealth campaign that UNTFlyer got passed, he was just too rotten to keep around. But it was well after the pain was inflicted at a time that basically meant we were never gonna get to move up any further on the FBS Conference totem pole than many schools that would have never passed us by if we had even mediocre AD leadership. RV'd...very hard

To me, the offensive struggles from a year ago, has so much to do with having a team built for three yards and a cloud of dust and having them learn the spread. Harrell said last year in two-a-days that the guys were having trouble grasping the offense. It's a roster still full of round pegs and square holes, but I think this year will show more improvement, especially at QB and at WR. The OLine is what it is, but I think the passing game will be better.

Our true rival is Apathy and it's not really close...

Awesome!! Great news!!

Completely agree. He deserved the patience. Johnny Jones had the same issue at first, but he built up a winner and started getting really good TX HS talent. That's my hope for Seth Littrell.