untjim1995

The only head coach in the last 45 years to do anything major here was Hayden Fry--to that extent, the answers to why he was able to do that should be able to lead you into the direction of why the others have failed. First, unlike any of the others, Hayden Fry was a known commodity within Texas. He had success and had built up recruiting relationships in Texas already as a head coach. He was an innovative coach on offense, which brings people to games. He was a great communicator to the media and community groups, which brings in money. Nobody we have hired since then has met those three criteria. Jerry Moore came from Nebraska where the ran the I-formation. Bob Tyler came from Miss State. Corky Nelson was the DC for Baylor, IIRC. Dennis Parker was a HS coach. Matt Simon was the OC at New Mexico. Darrell Dickey was the OC at SMU. Todd Dodge was a HS Coach. Dan McCarney was a losing head coach from Iowa State that ran an incredibly basic offense, while also serving as the OL coach at Florida before he got hired here. And now we have Littrell, who was the playcaller at UNC. None of these hires have given Texas HS recruits, coaches, or parents a reason to rarely think of us as a primary choice unless the other offers have been underwhelming compared to us (basically FCS or other SBC-type teams). Dickey did the best at recruiting here, but it wasn't great by any imagination--he just had a way to get kids here that fit his mindset better than anyone else. His offense was no better than McCarney's was, his demeanor was even worse, and his attitude toward scheduling was pathetic--but he was still better than anyone else here as a I-A coach since Fry left. Sad, but true... Now, keep in mind, Texas State hired Franchione, who fit all of the criteria that Fry did above, yet he still failed eventually down there. But maybe that was more on Texas State than it would have been here--we will never know. But those qualities that Hayden fry had coming into the job here have never been duplicated completely by UNT when hiring a new coach. Maybe Littrell turns it all around, even though he doesn't fit that bill above, hopefully he can do it here. Lord knows he has one helluva pit to dig up from, which isn't helped by the current AD, IMO.

SMU's reputation in recruiting circles and within DFW media makes them very different from us. Whether we agree or not, SMU, because of its private status, is looked at very highly on the academic front overall.

True. I don't want Mason to be compared to McNulty at all. That's not fair to him. McNulty got to play here because his dad's buddy thought he would be a great QB for his Metamucil Offense. It turns out that he couldn't be a QB at one other FBS school in America, but got to start here because the coach liked his leadership and intangibles, neither of which led to very many wins. As a matter of face, the one of the two games we won with McNulty as the starter was against FIU in 2014--and he was so bad that the coach didn't run one pass play in the entire 4th quarter because it was obvious that he would turn it over and cost us the game. That's where the vomit reference came from...

Well, McNulty had a PWO offer from Iowa and we took a chance on him...look at how awesome he did for us!! He became a starter!! Vomit.

Just without the wins or the money...

One thing about CUSA that is nice for us is that it does give us division games with four teams that were clearly above us on the FBS totem pole: La Tech, USM, Rice, and UTEP. Obviously, UTSA wasn't, but its at least another conference game in Texas. This setup, even if it disappoints when it turned out to be different than what we thought it would be when we finally got invited, is still light years better than any conference setup we have had since the Missouri Valley of the 60s. CUSA West is not bad at all, especially if UAB get back up and rolling and stays in our division--UTSA is the only school that is a newer entrant to FBS. Its CUSA East that just sucks, once you get past Marshall, MUTS, and WKU. The F_Us, ODU, and Charlotte don't even register on anyone' radar, not that the other three teams in the East bring extra fans here when they play or attract local fans to come here, but at least they have all done something decent in football and don't sound like they are named after airports...

This may be the absolute, most perfect post ever on gmg.com...the entire program.

SMU will terminate the series when they don't need the game against us--if they are winning big, they will drop us. If they are losing games to us, they will bolt, too. The only way they keep this series going for that long is if they stay mediocre or worse, but still beat us more times than not. They know our fans will fill up Ford Stadium when we play down there, giving them a nice attendance bump, as well as a win over us to keep us from gaining any recruiting traction. If you doubt this, look at basketball. We played them periodically for years until Larry Brown got there. Now, that they are great, they have zero interest in playing us. When we were good under Johnny Jones, they stopped playing us. It was only when we sucked or were mediocre that we played them. That's how they work--always have, always will.

Don't care...RV stays in budget///UNT BOR

Yeah, he alone makes me give pause to having any excitement about Littrell. But I'm willing to give the guy a chance to see if he can do something positive here. But there is absolutely no doubt that the odds are not in the favor of turning this around anytime soon. Littrell is either gone to another school above us on the FBS totem pole or is not a head coach within 4 years here. Its that kind of hire--swing for the fences with a young guy and if he hits a HR, then he's gone from here. If he strikes out, he's gone, just like Todd Dodge. This isn't like McCarney or Dickey, where both of those guys were going to be here for years because there was no demand for them to lead a program higher up the foodchain.

Meacham at TCU would have made more sense, just from his name within Texas HS circles and the success his offense has had at TCU. That said, I really wanted Sonny Cumbie, because of his playing days at Tech under Leach, plus his success as co-OC at TCU, meaning his name would have translated well with Texas HS coaches and parents of recruits. But I like Seth Littrell--he is what I would want as a coach here: young, good pedigree, solid results as a playcaller, and a good line of coaches to have worked under/learned from in his career. He will need more time to build up a reputation here in Texas, but if he does, it will gain a lot of attention. But its very possible that he cannot make any significant in-roads here, either, with recruiting, at least not enough improvement to see us vault up the overall rankings in recruiting. It certainly wasn't going to happen this recruiting season--if you are expecting anything major, I'm not sure what to say...we earned our way to the bottom of the FBS foodchain. To get up from here will take a lot of time, particularly with a coach who has never been a head coach before, and especially with the dearth of talent here. He basically inherited a roster of very low talent, no QBs, and full of guys who have shown that they will quit. If we are really, really lucky, we might be back at 4 wins by 2017. That would put as on par with the recovery plan Southern Miss had to endure after an 0-12 season, followed by a 1-11 season, followed by a 3-9 season, and just ending a CUSA West championship season in 2015. That's the example to follow, if at all possible.

Congratulations on surpassing North Texas on an endowment and athletic prowess...I mean, wow, how did the school in the energy capital of the world manage to get an endowment bigger than a teacher's college? That's is just really amazing and definitely worthy of going to their school's fan site to scoreboard their fans...not completely stupid AT ALL. And you surpassed a music school for better athlete's for your football team while sitting in the heart of the 4th biggest city in America. Again, that is just incredible. How did y'all manage to do that? I mean, as soon as UNT's College of Music shows up again in the top ten music programs in the country, I bet your Cougar Fans board must get overrun with UNT fans going over there to talk $hit about this...oh wait, that would be about as stupid as posting about scoreboarding us in endowment and recruiting rankings on our fan site--when we NEVER play you in anything. Of course, I'm sure you go to shaggybevo.com or texags.com and brag about this stuff, too, right? I mean that's who you are fighting to be, so I bet you just tear it up on those boards, correct? No?? Is it because both of those schools look down at you like as someone they want nothing to do with? Surely not...I mean surely those two schools are seeing what you are doing and just begging to get you into their conferences and to play you regularly...oh wait...it appears that want nothing to do with you, leaving you permanently sucking their leftovers--which, crazily enough, means you aren't very far away at all, in the grand scheme of things, from a school that doesn't spend anything close to what you do on sports. Some would call that sad--I would call it ironically funny...

It could just be that LIttrell needs an arm--any arm--just to have as a practice team QB for the next few years. And if he doesn't turn into anything of major note, at least he helped him get his offensive scheme implemented at this program that was built on a plodding, run-first, throw bubble-screen second type of offense under Mac. This is just a matter of a warm body and an arm that can help you teach the receivers. If its anything else better, that is just gravy...

And?? You think we are getting called up to the AAC or MWC anytime soon? Surely you don't think that these conferences want anything to do with us right now, correct?

If CUSA and the SBC want to be forward thinking, they would combine into east and west divisions, so as to keep their TV coverage, but make divisions line up geographically for travel costs and easier fan attendance. The AAC school and the MWC school are a different breed, a cut above the rest of the G5s. Now, it could easily see UTEP and Rice leave to go west to the MWC, which I expect to happen. But even so you would have this setup: SBCUSA West NMSU, UTSA, Texas State, UNT, Arkansas State, La Tech, ULL, ULM, USM, UAB and South Alabama SBCUSA East MUTS, WKU, FIU, FAU, Ga State, Ga Southern, Troy , Marshall, Appy State, ODU, and Charlotte Since scheduling is so hard for these schools, they will play 10 inter-division games, plus two OOC games--which will really help this when the P5s split away and we cannot play them anymore for a bodybag game to pay for our non-revenue sports. The winners of each division play for the SBCUSA Championship. If anyone leaves to go to the AAC or MWC, you just realign the divisions to continue to be geographic.

None of this should be surprising or even disappointing. Littrell is digging us out of hole tha tis miles deep. We aren't down here by luck. Our program was the worst in the country last year, and its not like we have enjoyed anything but bad to incredibly awful football for all of the last 11 years, sans 2009. Go back to 1995, when we went up to Division 1 football, when recruits weren't even a glint in their parents' eyes, all their parents and coaches have seen is a program that doesn't know how to compete at this level or, even worse, doesn't want to compete at this level, but knows that we can get funding from other schools by playing at this level. We are 84-166 since 1995, a .336 winning percentage. Against FCS schools, we are 6-2 in that timeframe, not including provisional teams like Troy, WKU, and USA. Against actual FBS programs, we are winning about 31% of our games...covering 21 years. 4 winning seasons, 17 losing seasons. Losing seasons of 8 or more games in that span: 13. To think that Seth Littrell, within a month of being on the job here in Texas, recruiting to a school with a horrid track record for results and support in football, as well as being new to the state since he is coming here from UNC, was going to raise the level of recruiting to anything above the UTSA's and Texas State's of the world is just dreaming. And I only list those schools because they had coaches leave late in the recruiting season, otherwise they wouldn't even be in this discussion. Littrell has one selling point--playing time in a wide-open offense. That's it. Stadium and facilities are very nice, but so are most of our peers now. Offense we run is basically the same as what every other modern football program runs, thankfully. Academics are good here, but so are they at a lot of other colleges we compete against. So that leaves the playing time--and every recruit needs to hear Littrell and company tell them that playing time can be had the moment you walk on campus...its not like the current roster even showed anyone that they deserve to start. You cannot go 1-11, suffer the most humiliating loss in modern college football history by quitting on the school on Homecoming against a FCS school, and expect to get to be given a starting job. The real world doesn't work like that--and every recruit, their parents and their coaches, should all hear that.

The non-power schools in the state of Texas ought to have a showcase that involved UNT, UTEP, Rice, UTSA, UTA, SFA, SHSU, Lamar, Texas A&M-CC and Texas State. Because there are 4 CUSA schools and 5 Southland schools and 1 SBC school, you could always have them face off without running into a conference foe playing. I'd revolve the venues to each section of the state in smaller cities that would come out and support this, places like Midland/Odessa in the west, Wichita Falls in the north, Tyler/Longview in the east, and a place like Galveston in the south. I'd do it in December, when the students are gone, when none of these school see anyone at their games of major note. It would be a five game extravaganza and it would pretty fun. The Power schools will never participate, but you could get 10 teams in Texas that are mid-majors to help each other on a lot of fronts.

I always thought his son would have been a solid player at UNT if he would have ever made his way here after choosing UCLA. I always wondered if Ronnie Morgan felt that UNT wouldn't maximize his potential for his son.

This has no chance because SMU and TCU don't want to do it. Its that simple.

In my entire history of being on gmg.com, I have ignored three posters: GL2Greatness/CheckFacts, MeanGreener/RyanMunthe, and Skiver/Andrew. Notice that each of them have had multiple usernames because the original ones got banned or ignored by so many? Remember that when you are arguing anything with Andrew. CheckFacts/GL2Greatness hated UNT for whatever reason. MeanGreener/RyanMunthe have anger issues, But this combo poster known as Skiver/Andrew is a different animal altogether, one who thinks his playing days at the PEB and in HS make him legit to talk down to posters and beg them to come play him in a scrimmage that is supposed to be a fun fundraiser. He has taken the stance that supporting Tony Benford as a decent head coach at UNT, when Super Pit attendance has dropped by over half in the last 4 years, as have the wins, is a way to show how much smarter he is than other posters. That's a very "special" mindset, indeed... Remember the old adage about arguing with fools...

There's just no way, not in today's college basketball. Nobody coaches in their contract year anymore. it would be so perfectly RV to somehow have Benford do that, though. He is dying to have a coach to extend, just to show the few thousand that still care that he made a hire worth an extension, plus he gets an extension himself if that occurs, IIRC.

Benford is Dead Man Cosching right now. The players know it. It's just a matter of when RV pulls the plug. I've guessed late January/early February for quite a while. I do think Rob Evans will coach as an interim to finish the season when it goes down. And then we get to find out who the next RV hire for a revenue sport will be...

That day should be in roughly 10 years...

Young BG, you are starting to understand...we told you that you will eventually see how things work here. All of us were just like you at one time in our lives, full of Mean Green belief and wanting to be included at parties full of Longhorns, Aggies, Sooners, Bears, Horned Frogs, Hogs, etc...to talk sports without getting laughed out of the house. We knew that one day we could become every bit as good as them, all it would take was the university committing to making us a winner. For me, it was basically 1990-2013. But 2014's regression in football, combined with the continued accepted ineptitude of Benford, made me realize that my roommates in college and our college buddies who long ago abandoned UNT Sports were the ones who were right about us not giving a damn about sports. My roommate was prone to say, "Why would I care about our teams when the administration doesn't care." I scoffed at that thought, thinking he just didn't want to give us his support because we were a loser. But it was in 2014, when a Texas HS Coach told me that his kids didn't want to go to UNT because of the fact that it was seen as a place that didn't care about winning at football, it made me finally realize what I was connected to all of these years and how wrong I was for believing otherwise. The light literally came on and I knew that expecting us to ever care about winning was fruitless. On a good note, this season showed that the UNT 17 have made it possible to not have to accept being totally embarrassed anymore, by ponying up the funds to fire McCarney on the spot after suffering the worst loss in modern college football history. That was the best athletic administrative decision that UNT has ever done in my lifetime of following them, which is really sad, but also hopeful, too.

"And if you don't kiss up to them, like I do, you'll get fired if you can't turn things around...that's why the last guy got canned"...RV to SL