untjim1995

Oregon State, Vanderbilt, Houston, Baylor (twice), TCU, and UNLV.

Helwig was a bad AD, but he did one thing better than RV--getting name teams to the area to play us in football. He just ignored everything else and whored us out in football and basketball to pay for everything. He probably had no other option with the resources that the university wasn't giving to athletics at the time. He needed to go when he left, but at least he didn't stay 5+ years beyond his usefulness like RV did.

Too late, Lifer...

What I see going forward is that the SBC, CUSA, and your top FCS programs in the region will form three conferences. WIth the MAC, as well, that foursome will have OOC and bowl agreements going forward. A lot of change will occur in the future as the AAC, Big XII leftovers, and the MWC will be the new leagues that have some type of "access" to the power leagues, in terms of playing them in OOC, playing them in bowl games, and getting a spot in the BCS Bowl Games (not the playoff). I think that the Big XII leftovers (all but UT, OU, Tech, OSU, KU, and WVU) will probably go to the MWC and AAC--I see TCU and Baylor going west, KSU and ISU going East. That would put each of the MWC and AAC at 14 teams, both with Texas ties. That's when I see us being in this conference setup--UNT, UTEP, UTSA, Rice, Texas State, NMSU, ULL, SFA, SHSU, ULM, La Tech, and Arkansas State.

This is also a picture of what most of us wanted to do after the Portland State game last season...but without the water...

The new AD should be a step forward. But its possible to go backwards, even if remotely. If the next AD is Hank, and we extend Benford, and Littrell cannot fix anything in the next three years, there will be no doubt that we have gone backward. But again, that's remote...I truly believe Smatresk will hire from outside of the university and that Benford's last days as our coach will end within the next 9 months--and I truly think Littrell will improve things around here by 2018. To me, the best way we will know if the next AD is making a big step forward will be seen in actual attendance at football and basketball games. If that is seen, then the season ticket revenues and MGC memberships will follow. Just watch to see the butts-in-seats and that will tell you if we are moving forward or staying still. If it drops, then this is a situation that probably cannot get fixed. You cannot run a FBS program if your average attendance is 40% of capacity. And if men's basketball attendance cannot improve from being less than 20% of capacity, then its all a moot point. At that point, you will have probably gone close to 15 years with one winning season in football and zero winning season in mens hoops since JJ left, all while FBS realignment has been and will be going in full force. OTOH, if we can see Littrell turn this around in the next few years and we get a good hire in basketball that gets attention and can turn the talent that is here now into a winner, the attendance should be significantly higher than it is today. And that would be a great sign that we have in place the person who knows what he is doing in leading this department, getting the revenue sports in the right direction. Attendance will pick up and so will the other revenue streams with it.

I agree with you on this. And those 26 straight wins got us 4 NO Bowls and 3 of the 4 winning seasons we have enjoyed since moving back up to I-A in 1995. But I also just look at the 26 straight SBC wins and match it up with the fact that he beat two I-A teams outside of the SBC in those 4 years, Cincy and Baylor, as well as the fact that Troy was the only SBC team in that timeframe that made a bowl game--nobody else came close. He lost 21 games to other non-SBC teams from 2001-2004. We shouldn't have anything named after a coach or AD who had left here with a losing record, no matter who made that demand at the time. If Mattress Mac won't come back into the fold as a giving alum to the program, those fields should be up for re-bidding and everyone should be told why they are being up for being re-named. Hell, even if nobody bid on changing the name of them, the AD should just change the sign and call them the Mean Joe Greene Practice Fields or the Hayden Fry Practice Fields. We may be a colossal loser in football over the last 35 years, but that doesn't mean we have to show the world that we celebrate that losing by naming stuff after the coach who lost less than everyone else during his tenure here, even if its because the university didn't even try to fund the program. If I were recruiting against North Texas, you can bet your ass that I'd be selling the recruits on what a big loser in football they have been and that this is accepted--and I'd point out that the practice fields are even named after a coach who went 42-64 in 9 years, not to mention that you won't have an indoor facility to practice in. Whether its UTSA, Texas State, UTEP, or any other CUSA/SBC Western team, our legacy as a losing program that has been tied up by apathy from the UNT Family would be super easy to use in recruiting battles.

Good stuff, as always, Arkstfan...you guys are over 50% better at raising revenue in Jonesboro, Arkansas than we are in Denton, even with a substantially smaller student body and alumni base. Says a lot about your leadership and their approach to athletics--and it says even more about the realities of how we have handled athletics in the past here. UConn at $17.5 million is not surprising--they are a national name and will always have a place in the upper echelon of college sports when the future schism occurs. Facts are hard for today's entitled youth. They think we should all be P5 equals just because... It is beyond embarrassing to share a degree from the same school with anyone that thinks the bottom half of all P5s are equal with us, even though a simple bit of research shows that Rutgers brings in more than 6x what we bring in--and represents the worst revenue collector of the P5s. UConn has won several titles in both mens and womens basketball. And they are still $6.5 million behind the worst P5 program. But somehow, we have people who believe we, at UNT, with our $4 million in revenue, are on equal footing with both of them right now. Never mind that we probably would be doing good to only be behind 30 other G5 schools in terms of revenue and media coverage. Keep fighting the good fight, Arkstfan. You're a great asset to this board. And I'd even tell that to your face...

I think the reality is that what we have seen happen here for the last 5 seasons in basketball, the last decade in football, and the accepted leadership of the program by the administration and BOR is finally being attended to. The results are yet to be determined, but what I fear the most is that the brand of North Texas is so badly thought of athletically by our own fans and alumni, the media, and HS coaches and is not going to be fixed before the next realignment occurs. As this column strongly suggests, the reality is that CUSA is unsustainable with this kind of geography. Aside from maybe Marshall, La Tech, and USM, nobody really attracts attention when they play a football game. And has been mentioned before, schools like these three and WKU are never going anywhere else because they provide no media market. This is probably it for them. For the rest of CUSA, including us, the reality is that we may provide the markets, but we aren't good enough to really attract attention in those markets without beating some big names. And the AAC above us is just a more successful and recognized version of what we want CUSA to be again. Just like with CUSA 2.0 before us, we aren't getting in there with SMU already there, just from a market standpoint. And the MWC knows that realignment will bring them the Texas ties they want when the Big XII falls apart. That's when the potential arises that Tech, Baylor, TCU, Rice, UTEP, and UTSA will be available ahead of us for choosing.

So name just one...go ahead. We will wait...

This is a positive, no doubt about it...but there isn't any fan I know who wouldn't trade a high team GPA in the revenue sports for more wins and championships. But that said, it does sound like the non-revenue sports are really doing the job on and off the field. That is always a great sign for the entire program.

No we wouldn't...seriously, why we need to tear those out and start over because someone else bid again on the naming rights of a practice field? Because that donor is no longer around and doesn't even mention us as an interest anymore...if he can come back into the fold with a new AD, then we can keep it as is. If not, let us get some more revenue and reopen that naming process again. I don't think you all understand how ridiculous it is that those fields are named after a coach who had a 42-64 record here and only had three winning seasons out of nine. And that isn't even talking about the ridiculous interactions he had with the fans and media. Mattress Mac is the only reason that name is there and he hasn't given back to the athletic department since the Dickster was fired, which is now approaching 10 years ago.

There may never be a dumber thing you'll ever post in your life than saying 30 P5 schools are "in the same economic boat" as us. You show me one F'ing P5 with an athletic budget like ours, a conference affiliation like ours, or is clearly near the bottom in recruiting against their in-state peers. Go ahead...Ill wait...ill even help. Kansas?? Nope, gigantic budget because basketball pays the bills there. Texas Tech?? Nope, budget dwarfs ours and they get annual visits every year from UT and OU in football. Washington State?? Again, budget dwarfs ours, they get Washington and Oregon every year there to boost attendance and media coverage. 30 teams...hell, you can't find one.

I got it from common sense to not have anything on your athletic department named for a losing coach who only has his name on that sign because we were held hostage by the donor giving us a million dollars and threatening to take it back. Those fields should be named after either Hayden Fry or Mean Joe Greene. This is an easy thing to correct if the next AD is competent and sees value in the naming rights of those fields. Hell, the field on Apogee could just as easily be named after a huge donor if the right AD gets in there and makes some improvement with the alumni.

Saw this on Facebook today. I wonder if the next AD will try to get him on board again to at least show us as a team or school he would be interested again. If not, the practice fields are up for bidding again...still can't believe RV let him name the fields after the Dickster after Mattress Mac threw a fit. BTW, it doesn't show on here, but below this on his Facebook bio, he shows that he played football at both UT and at North Texas, so he does use us to look better on his resume...but has no interest in our school.

It is completely representative of the reality that the SBC, CUSA, and MAC face...we don't have enough of a following to get solid network deals or strong enough attendance to make up for it. I personally don't see how the P5s will stick with the G5s much longer. The NCAA is their power tool and they have all of the legislative and media control. I do believe that schools in the higher echelon of the G5 will get included, in some form or fashion, within the next move upward of the P5s, but the rest of us don't have much of a chance. The budget differences between the AAC and CUSA is vast and the AAC trails the P5s by tens of millions of every year in network and ticket revenues. The difference between Texas Tech and Houston is very wide, budget-wise. But the difference between us and Tech is Grand Canyon wide. There just isn't any way that economics will work out for the G5s to have some form of quasi-membership with the P5s like they have now. They play games against each other that people want to see week-in and week-out in conference play for two months of a season, both on TV and in person. The rest of us don't get that luxury and never will.

This seems very F_U--like. Build a smaller stadium and hope to be able to expand it later.

Mediocre would be averaging half of the full capacity. So football is abysmal and basketball is just nuclear fallout bad...

Mitch Maher had a great career here--it was as a I-aa QB, but he was the best QB we have had here since I began following our program. Scott Hall had the guts, but the offense he played under was meant for a busdriver--similar to Derek Thompson. Andrew Smith showed some flash and he was our qb when we own the NO Bowl, but he died so young, we just can't say for certain he would have been like those three. The worst Qbs I have ever seen us roll out as starters are 1a): Andrew McNulty and 1b.) Josh Greer, with honorable mention to Richard Bridges...

Build an indoor practice facility next--we don't need baseball until football and basketball are going in the right direction and making money.

Black Sweater vests would seem more appropriate...

My only fear with the new AD is that the reputation of the university's views toward athletics for so long cannot get older alumni reconnected, even though things have changed greatly on that front in the last few years. It means that the MGC doesn't grow like we want and that season ticket base doesn't increase. 2014 was a real downer for a lot of us when we found out that our season ticket base dropped AFTER a 9-4 season that featured a huge HoD Bowl win in front of 35k MG fans in Dallas on NYD. Then we saw that the MGC wasn't even growing 2% of the alumni that graduated in RV's tenure. The I-AA fiasco wiped out generations of fans, but it feels like those who have graduated since we moved up to I-A in 1995 have had more interest in athletics here, even though we have sucked mightily for most of that time. But I also feel like RV's ineptness and accepted laziness for so long hurt a lot of those alumni, too. For now, its really easy to see this being all on RV--and a I think that is mostly correct. But I just hope that whoever comes in next can make headway with alumni and local citizens near here that RV couldn't or didn't make any traction with. RV will say that we didn't win so that hurt his ability to grow the MGC and season ticket holders, but he was the one who hired all of them. I will say this--if Littrell cannot turn the football program around and if the next AD cannot measurably fix our meager MGC and season ticket numbers, we are really going to have ask ourselves if this can get fixed here. And that is why Harry is dead-on to say this is the most important athletic hire of our last 35+ years.

No, RV's biggest failure is a tie between hiring an inexperienced assistant coach that had made his name as a recruiter to take over the best basketball program we had in decades. The Dodge experiment was a head coaching failure more than an AD failure--as it was a Hail Mary hire. The problem on the AD's end with Dodge was not making him hire college coaches for his staff in the first few years. Our low point in existence was Portland State beating us 66-7 on our Homecoming, but Dodge gave us the 2nd one, when we were annihilated at Rice 77-20 in his second year. Rice had 77 points in the 3rd quarter and easily could have scored 100+ if they had wanted to. We have had horrible leadership and personnel in place for revenue athletics for a long time, sans Johnny Jones. Hopefully, Jalie Mitchell and Seth Littrell are going to be the ones to change course for us for a long time in the right direction, as well as whoever gets hired as our next AD.

These are two examples of just how small time we were back then. Fouts was terrible, the SBC was the lowest conference on the totem pole, and we had several losing seasons in a row while being led by coaching staffs that openly fought and argued with fans in the stands. We may be #128, but we ain't that pathetic anymore...

It will take a person who can look at this situation and see ways to succeed here at raising funds and winning in revenue sports--and get reassurances from the administration and BOR that the university won't torpedo the efforts that are going to be needed. Similar to how I've always felt about conferences above our current situation, its going to take someone who can see the potential here and actually believe in that so much that they will take on the job because he or she believes completely in our future being much better than the past.