untjim1995

People on here don't want to realize that the reputation we earned over the last 35 years with TX HS coaches and parents is basically the fire-breathing dragon that burns ever head coach we have hired since Fry left here. Maybe Littrell is the one that finally slays that dragon--but right now, he's building an army of kids that aren't that coveted or kids that were coveted and went somewhere else and then came here because they couldn't play at the other school. Johnny Jones made that work as the hoops coach here until the program became good enough on its own to start getting in some solid talent that others also wanted badly. This has to be SL's preferred way to try and build this up--because he, like JJ, isn't a real solid public speaker--McCarney sucked at recruiting, but it wasn't because he didn't try as hard as he could to sell the opportunity here. DMac truly believed that UNT was just gonna be a USF starter-kit, just get going and watch lots of Texas HS talent just migrate to Denton--but he couldn't get that talent, especially at QB, to ever come here and it led to the worst loss in modern college football history. But Littrell's offense should get the attention of QBs and other skilled players, even if his style is more reserved and quiet in public. Until the TX HS Coaches and parents look at us as a program that their kids would be a great fit for, we are going to continue to see the other SBCUSA schools out-recruit us. Only UTEP has had recruiting issues like we have had over time, in part because of its remote location away from the bigger population centers in Texas. Texas State and UTSA both can sell to recruits a lot of playing time, a program built upon growing into something, and they don't have apathy holding back generations of alumni and fans like we do.

I see 6-6. wins over Lamar, UTSA, UAB, UTEP, Rice, and ODU.

7 should be the answer, especially if we go bowling, as you're suggesting with a 7-6 record.

5 wins, I'll be disappointed, but I'll understand... 6 wins will give me confidence that we are really making progress. > 6 wins means SL was a great hire and probably moves on very soon. < 5 wins: barring injuries at QB or the OL providing us with some excuses, this will be very disappointing if we only win 3-4 games. This schedule is easier than anything we have had in a long time.

This is your best...kudos, sir...

Man, that's a great and fascinating story about Mayfield that I had never heard before. It makes me realize now why Kingsbury wouldn't ever put him on scholarship--the combo of dad and son being attitudinal makes this all the more clear why he was basically told to look somewhere else for a scholarship after starting at Tech as a freshman walk-on.

Don't forget about Dusty Dvoracek, either...

UNC never made the Final Four...

SL can gain the OU job IF he wins in the years ahead as a head coach, but he could also look at this opening as the best chance to coach anything of major note at his alma mater.

Would Lincoln Riley call SL to be his OC?

A few things: 1.) At a school like ours, the BEST thing for us would be that the coaches and ADs were able to use us a stepping stone upward. Tulsa did that in hoops for a long time. UH has done it in football. That would be awesome to follow those schools...since the early 80's, we have had exactly one coach get hired away from here to move upward, Johnny Jones, who went to his alma mater and quickly fell apart there. Literally, not one football coach since Jerry Moore got hired to go to Tech in 1980 has seen anyone want them to be the head coach at their school after seeing what they have done at UNT (not one). Same with our ADs. 2.) You hit in the head perfectly about Boise's biggest advantage being located in Boise, Idaho. They have no other entertainment options to vie for competition from fans. They have schools around their region who would go and play there. They had a civic group who brought a bowl game to a place that nobody imagined wanting to go in December for a game, but yet it has lasted. And they had an administration that wanted athletics to serve as the primary window to their university, which has worked out greatly for them. It obviously is not guaranteed, as we have seen often, but you get zero hits on the pitches you don't swing at. Until very, very recently, our university refused to even pick up the bat for athletics, much less swing hard. Here's to hoping that is changing, although I believe its too late to make a difference for being FBS in the long-term now. 3.) There is exactly one school in the country that fits the exact same situation that we sit in, which is San Jose State. A commuter school, historically, that shares a market with Power schools in Cal and Stanford, not to mention the 4 major sports being represented with the Niners, Raiders, A's, Giants, Warriors, and Sharks. But they got the invitation to their perfect league, the MWC. We haven't, as soon as we finally got the invite to CUSA, it was already becoming the SBC 2.0, then ECU, Tulane, and Tulsa all jumped ship, which got us reunited with the old gang of FAU, MUTS, and WKU. In true UNT conference-affiliation luck, even the SBC teams we liked being in a conference with, Arky State and ULL, didn't get invited to move up, but instead we got the F_Us, relative newcomers at the time or now in UTSA, Charlotte, and ODU, and then two eastern SBC callups in MUTS and WKU that nobody around here cares too much about even when they are good. CUSA West is great for us, but CUSA overall, isn't much to celebrate, when its mostly SBC teams, big market teams with no history (Charlotte and ODU) or teams that are stuck here in Marshall, USM, and UAB.

The problem with our schedule isn't the bodybag game-we HAVE to have it to pay the bills around here. Its the fact that we play FCS spares that no one has heard of or cares about every year here. Not a one of them will bring any marginal group here, except maybe a few hundred will show up from ACU when they play here. SFA and SHSU remain the only two FCS teams worth scheduling and we avoided both like the plague so we could schedule Texas Southern, Nicholls State, Portland State, Bethune-Cookman, Lamar, Incarnate Word, ACU, Houston Baptist, and Rhode Island. These games don't help our cause one bit--they don't bring anyone in from those schools to watch the game beyond a few dozen or so, you don't get any new fans charged up for games from the UNT side of the equation, you get no media coverage for the game, and the game really doesn't help you prepare for actual FBS teams you will play later in the season. That Nicholls State game was the best evidence of this--we beat that team 77-3. We saw Dajon Williams look like the QB we finally wanted to have, while playing in this wide-open offense we hadn't seen McCarney ever call. Then,, when playing the next few CUSA games, we saw that it was all a farce. Even last year's win over BC didn't really tell us much, as Mason Fine looked better against them than he did against anyone else on the schedule. I've said it before, but that SMU series should have been used to get us a quality home opponent to play here in OOC games, so that you can use that SMU game in Dallas every other year to still be a 6th chance to watch us play near home, while giving us the year they play here in Denton as the chance to play 6 home games, with two OOC games worth watching. Imagine playing SMU in Dallas, paired with the road game at bodybag, then a home game against Army, and a road game at BYU. Then next year, you play SMU and BYU at home, while playing at Army and the bodybag. That is infinitely better all the way around than what we do now. To me, playing at SMU is a half home game anyway, while playing a FCS spare at Apogee isn't worth more than half a game against a real FBS school. It could have been used that way by RV, but he settled for the easiest path (shocker). WB can fix this, but its gonna take a commitment from the university to redo those FCS games for the future. I believe he will try his best to do just that.

Enjoy every second of it. I've got three and they are starting to get too old too quick, with the oldest getting ready for middle school and the youngest about to start 1st grade. These days are hard, but they are the best--if it makes any sense at all to put it that way...

Playing Houston at home is a good fit for getting casual fans to attend, even marginally interested fans to come with their buddies. Losing to them badly, which we did when we opened up the stadium, doesn't bring anyone back, as evidenced after that loss. What would do wonders for us all the way around is to beat them. It would help with attention, coverage, and recruiting interest--in a bigger fashion than any of us really can guess. They are the top G5 program in this region of the country and were the top G5 program (and one of the best overall) in the country two years ago. TX HS Coaches, parents, and recruits KNOW about UH in this region of the country. The only thing they know about us is that we have usually sucked at football, while rarely giving it much support.

BYU is the one we should be approaching--great history, great fan support, and great name recognition. BYU in Denton should sell out, if only because of the Mormons coming out to support them like they did when they played TCU in the old MWC days.

Here's the great news. Last year, we were either 128 or 127 on most of these lists. Now, with UAB back and Coastal Carolina moving up, we now have 64 G5 programs, including Army and UMass, but not including BYU. That means in one year, we went from being the worst or second worst program to now being ahead of 27 other G5s. That's what I see as progress, getting better than other G5 schools we compete against. Now, there are 36 squads in front of us at this level, but it just shows how much SL moved us up in the minds of college football fans and media. I truly didn't think we would win more than 2 games last year, so winning 5 with a brand new QB, under a brand new offense, with a brand new staff was damn near miraculous to me. Its why I feel like 6 wins is very attainable this fall, as the roster gets stronger and more used to SL and his staff while the schedule in conference gets MUCH easier than last year. We play FCS Lamar, 4 CUSA teams ranked below us, 2 CUSA teams in front of us by less than 20 spots, and SMU who is ranked 97th. I don't know where Army or ODU will be ranked, but it won't be considerably hire than USM at 81 and we play both of them at home. Getting at least 6 wins will be the bar for success and progression this fall.

I've been watching us since 1990, so here's my Top 5 Top 5: 1.) Mitch Maher--great leader, solid decision-maker 2.) Scott Hall--ditto to above, just didn't get to throw the ball because of the Dickster's offense 3.) Scott Davis--got in late on him, saw him play a great game against SMU his senior year, but played down to the competition under Corky 4.) Derek Thompson--HoD MVP, who was very unpredictable, but his top end was usually very good and he did lead our team to its best season since 2003, which are the two best seasons we have probably had since Fry was here in the late 70's. 5.) Jason Mills--see above, but he never played on a solid team here, so his ups and downs probably had a lot to do with brutal schedules, beat up rosters, and subpar facilities. Honorable mentions: Riley Dodge, Daniel Meager, Gio Vizza, and Woody Wilson Worst QB: anyone who took a snap in 2014 and 2015--by far the worst QB play I've ever seen us have. I still can't believe how amazingly bad we were at recruiting and developing a QB under McCarney. If it hadn't been for Derek Thompson, I don't think Mac would have 9 games TOTAL in the three years he was our QB under his watch, much less 9 games in 2013 and 18 games in those 3 years from 2011--2013.

Rice was a doormat by the mid-70s, leaving the Houston market void of anything to support locally, unlike DFW, which had SMU and TCU, as well as a lot of Baylor influence, as well. UH had to overcome one school, with nobody else supporting their efforts to block Houston from joining. North Texas had three local to fairly local schools blocking the path, as well as Rice supporting them from Houston. From what we know, Arkansas, Texas, Houston, A&M, and Tech were either in favor of us joining or would agnostic to it. If we had gotten in, it would be so interesting to see where we would be today. I suspect it would be similar to where UH has been, maybe not quite as successful in football as you guys have been, post-SWC, but similar in conference-affiliation. Not only that, but we would have jumped SMU on the totem pole because of their death penalty and actually being in the SWC at the same time. The bigger one to look at, though, is the Big Eight. Let's say we joined them in the late 70's/early 80's. That's a conference that had national champions in football in the 70s and 80s in Nebraska and Oklahoma, as well as a national champion in basketball in Kansas in the 80's--not even to mention Colorado's rise to the top in the early 90's in football, as well as Oklahoma, Missouri, and K-State's excellent basketball programs of that time. If we had any modicum of success in that league, even with the SWC at its peak, we would have gotten a lot of attention from media, fans, and recruits. We would have been playing in an actual real football stadium in Denton, too, if we got to play OU, OSU, KU, KSU, CU, MU, ISU, and NU every other year here in football, not to mention what those teams would have brought each year to the Super Pit. Its why that decision in 1978 to not get included into the SWC is so glaring here. We should have had a Plan B or a better Plan A, but we didn't. We get shot down, our teams of the 70s don't get a bowl bid or an NCAA bid, Fry and Blakely leave, the Old Nestors regain control, we drop down to I-AA for 12 years, join some collection of teams called the Southland Conference, and the rest is history. We killed off generations of fans at a time when we should have been gaining fans, not to mention huge numbers of students and alumni at our growing university. It haunts us today in everything--from attendance, fundraising, and recruiting.

The CoogFans site, just like PonyFans, and KillerFrogs from years ago, always say the same thing about playing us in a series that involves a game in Denton. They play us when they need us, for wins or for help at the gate (or both in SMUs case). I love playing all those old SWC jack-wagons that got left behind when the Big 12 formed. They got so much media support that we could have only dreamed of having for decades, even still today. We never got even a crumb of help from these schools when it was obvious we would have been a great fit for the SWC. I still cannot understand for the life of me why Fry didn't try to get us into the old Big Eight at the same time and create a bidding war, because the SWC wouldn't want any of those schools getting more time in Texas to steal recruits. We would have been the perfect fit up there, too, with all big public schools, as well as at the time, a great basketball arena that would have allowed us to fit in even more nicely with that league. Instead, we didn't, predictably, even get a chance at the SWC, Fry left to Iowa, and we basically just gave up for about the next 20 years.

Exactly

The other thing that people don't realize about Boise State's rise up was that the Pac-12 North Teams would actually play games at Boise. It gave them huge wins over Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington in seasons past. It would be like us getting OU, UT, or A&M to play here and then we beat them.

Nowadays, many Power Schools will only play one road game, often its against other Power schools. They can because of their TV money and their gate from a home game, even at places like Kansas, Indiana, UVa, etc...What you will see is some of these downtrodden teams of the P5 play at G5s because they are hope they can get a win on the road against a lower opponent and can help bring a winning attitude to their team. Then, you have guys like Gundy at OSU that likes playing road games at G5s because he views them as good ways to teach his kids about winning on the road before conference season starts up. And, finally, you will see schools play at G5s that give their alumni an easy game to attend and helps with recruiting, like Texas has done with Rice in the past or OU does with Tulsa.

You might be right, but having seen you lose to Texas state, UTEP, UTSA, and SMU in recent years makes me believe that UNT might just add our names to that list of in-state TX teams to beat y'all. I like Applewhite a lot and I think he'll do a good job down there at UH before somebody else comes calling from the power conferences.

UH is an excellent replacement for Army. Texas opponent in the G5, but much higher than us on the college football totem pole, as well as giving us plenty of recruits to show TX parents and coaches that we play regularly near their families. Still don't like the Liberty series, but this is a great win.

Wren Baker, as I posted weeks ago, if you replaced Army with UH, I will gladly proclaim your greatness for scheduling someone who will bring more people to Apogee than Army. I believe you have done this, with UH having the number of fans and alumni following their program right now and living near here. This is a very solid replacement. Great job, Wren Baker!!