untjim1995

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.

Well, we did get over $2.1 million in donations after the Homecoming debacle...

Just because I did this last week from the cfn website ranking the FBS, I went and looked at how Athlon rates the entire G5 of 62 teams for 2016. #1 G5 team is UH. #62 is North Texas In the top 10 of the G5s, you have UH, Boise State, San Diego State, South Florida, Air Force, Temple, Cincy, Appy State, Navy, and Southern Miss. Conference Breakdown is 5 AAC schools, 3 MWC schools, 1 SBC school, and 1 CUSA school. In the top half of the G5s (the top 31 teams), the conference breakdown is 9 AAC schools (UH, USF, Temple, Cincy, Navy, UConn, Memphis, Tulsa, and East Carolina), 8 MWC schools (Boise State, San Diego State, AFA, Utah State, Nevada, Colorado State, UNM, and San Jose State), 6 CUSA schools ( USM, MUTS, Marshall, WKU, La Tech, and UTEP), 5 MAC schools (WMU, Toledo, NIU, CMU, and Ohio), and 3 SBC schools (Appy State, Arky State, and Ga Southern). Overall ratings of each conference--AAC--19.6 (#1 UH and #51 Tulane), MWC 27.1 (#2 Boise State and #55 Hawaii), CUSA 33.5 (#10 USM and #62 UNT), MAC 34.7 (#11 WMU and #58 EMU), and the SBC 36.6 (#8 Appy State and #60 ULM). Just wanted to show how another college football media looked at our level of play. CUSA comes up a little better than the MAC on this list, while the MAC was a bit ahead of CUSA in the CFN poll. The AAC and MWC still look much better as a whole, at the top half of the G5, and especially at the top of the G5 in the top ten.

I disagree--when you won a game because a really, really bad team came to your place and had to replace the 4th string QB with the 5th string QB in the second half and allowed a late TD to lose by 7 to us, and that represents your only win last year, you aren't coming from a good place. We should have been 0-12, but we did get to 1-11, including the worst loss in modern college football history. If you only win two games this upcoming season, while being considered the worst team in FBS for the season ahead, if you win a couple of games, it means you aren't the worst team in the country. Right now, that is progress, no matter how much it kills anyone to admit. When you get buried under 100 pounds of horse$hit, the first thing you gotta do is dig out and get some air. Doesn't mean you won't stink still and that anyone is going to please to be associated with you, but you have made progress in moving up from the current situation.

I am impressed you could even type that without dying of hysterical laughing first...

I just don't see us buying off these FCS schools or getting out of the bodybag games scheduled ahead against Arkansas, Wisconsin, or A&M. Ironically, the only thing I can truly see is the possibility of SMU buying out of the series with us in a few years. If that occurs, we would have another home-and-home available for rescheduling. We have Army for the next 8 years, which I know we will not get out of, and if SMU doesn't cancel the series, then we won't see another OOC opponent at Apogee until Memphis comes here after the Army series ends. Its too bad for the new AD, who will probably be shocked at all that he is going to have to try and build up when he gets the job, beyond just fundraising and hiring better coaches. The fundraising will determine the fate of the next AD, for sure, but the football scheduling that he will inherit only makes the job much harder. When you come to a job and look at in the next 4 football season ahead and see that you are hosting the CUSA , SMU, Army, Butt Cookman, Lamar, Incarnate Word, and Abilene Christian, you know that it isn't going to be sellouts at Apogee that will fix things here, even if we are good. The best crowds we have seen at Apogee since it opened had 28k for UH in its inaugural game and 24k for UTEP on Homecoming during our only good season in the last decade plus...

Not that I'm aware of...its really hard in the circumstances you listed above because LSU has no interest at playing a game outside of Baton Rouge or New Orleans against an in-state school. Same thing for A&M, Texas, OU, or Arkansas--they'll play at JerryWorld in DFW. The problem is that the P5s have all the money and power here. Sure, a school like Western Kentucky was shrewd enough to use a bought game at Wisconsin to get a home-and-home with Wisconsin in hoops, but that is also due to the fact that winning a game at WKU has some merit in the NCAA circles come Tournament Selection time. In the end, though, its up to the ADs at each school to work a deal. Previously, we had a lazy AD who just accepted the deal that some P5 powerhouse offered, just so it could be done. He knew that whatever they would pay us was enough to cover a lot of AD expenses, so negotiating didn't even matter to him. The schedule here will be bad for a while, barring something completely changing the games scheduled against FCS teams, SMU, or Army. My guess is that the one decent sized P5 we could get for a game here for many reasons is Oklahoma State. They have always played at G5s, have a ton of alumni in DFW, and only play here every other year when they go to Ft. Worth to play TCU. Kansas, Mizzou, and Colorado are others that could be enticed by getting another DFW game, as well, but OSU represents the best chance, IMO, of hosting a P5 that is in the Big XII and would fill up Apogee to close to a sellout.