untjim1995

The funny thing about McCarney sucking as a recruiter was that in his first couple of recruiting cycles here, he didn't do that bad--he wasn't beaten down yet by the issues that always seem to haunt us in recruiting. After 2012, it just seems like it went completely off the mountain. Morris had a few advantages that Littrell doesn't have when he got hired here. His connections to Texas High School Coaches is well-known and SMU being considered a high-end private school by most outsiders because of academic ranking gave him the opportunity to get going faster. Littrell will really have to look under a lot of rocks to get us up in recruiting circles within Texas High Schools. Its why I think his Oklahoma connections and much less competition up there for recruits that can't go to OU or OSU could help us a lot. That state produces good football players, too.

Its kind of funny to me--I'd think you could easily pull some of the UH recruits just by telling them that Herman won't be coaching there after next season, most likely, just like Art Briles and Kevin Sumlin left for greener pastures. Baylor and TCU are here to stay, though, as long as their coaches are in place and they aren't caught doing anything that causes probation.

So, uhm...do you like your gig?

Just wait until we name the Athletic Department after this AD...since he is the best we have ever had!! Vomit

It just amazes me how much people gripe about UNT90's RV posts--that are almost always spot-on--yet they don't even think about why he posts this stuff. RV is the worst AD in America. We just finished having the worst football team in our school's history and in the entire FBS this past season. That's not even counting where our basketball programs have been recently and are right now under his management. His athletic department cannot get these things right--all of these have been posted about recently on gmg.com: 1.) email about opponent and time of an upcoming basketball game at the Super Pit. 2.) cannot get the online mechanism correct for a season-ticket holder to actually send money to the AD to re-up on his season tickets 3.) we cannot even get tickets for HS coaches set up the way EVERY other school in Texas does... 4.) even buying a ticket for basketball game in the walk-up line was so much of a hassle that a poster almost gave up after driving all the way to Denton from DFW because it was too slow--at a venue that was about 80% empty. This would never, ever get accepted at the Murchison Center or any other venue that our College of Music and College of Fine Arts performs. Someone would get fired within days of this kind of stupidity, even if it was one of the 4 mentioned above. And people wonder why our attendance is brutal and our fundraising sucks ass--at some point, you just have to ask yourself what is it that everyone else sees by not going to games and supporting our alma mater, yet most on here are completely blind to it.

So, here's how I see things past and future, regarding UNT Hoops, since 2001. JJ obviously took over the worst situation a coach could inherit, from a morale standpoint. The previous coach, Vic Trilli, was basically Todd Dodge at UNT, before Todd Dodge got to UNT. Just a terrible game coach and locker room leader. Johnny Jones takes over, immediately brings a new mindset to the locker room and to the entire program. As time goes on, his game management gets better, leading to several winning seasons, solid runs in the postseason tournament for the SBC, and two NCAA berths. Unfortunately, the NCAA Committee only rewarded us with 15 seeds both times, which history shows is almost a sure loss. But JJ got us going and it led to some awesome transfers of very talented HS kids who couldn't make the leap to a Power conference team, which eventually led to us getting Tony Mitchell, the most talented player we have ever been able to get here. We were set to make the next step up when LSU came back to get their long lost son and bring him to Baton Rouge for a load of cash. As mentioned, lots of talent on the roster, many choices available to interview and hire, and RV goes with the Marquette assistant coach with no head coaching experience and who was known solely as a recruiter, Tony Benford, who was also a Texas Tech alum. If somehow, miraculous to think about at this point, but if that first Benford team had done what it was supposed to do, which was win the SBC and get a postseason berth, Texas Tech would have hired him immediately--that alone makes the hire a poor one, knowing full well that his alma mater, flush with cash, would pull him away, causing even more instability in the program. But, if the unthinkable (at the time) occurred, and the assistant with no head coaching experience showed he was obviously not up for the job, you are stuck with him until you deemed him affordable to let go of, which is usually the 4th year of a 5 year deal. He showed us all, almost immediately, that by losing to Division 2 Alabama-Huntsville in the Preseason NIT, this job was too much for Benford. That has been continuously proven since then, yet each season ending has brought us the sad news from RV that Benford just needs more time, just like he said about Todd Dodge. As we enter his make-or-break season, Benford is rewarding us in a very similar vein as Dodge and Trilli did, by losing in an even bigger fashion. But here's the amazing silver lining for our program. Almost inconceivably, we keep getting talent here--probably because Benford can still recruit great, despite every possible reason that he shouldn't be able to get anyone to come here, freshman or transfer. That leads me to believe that the next coach has the chance to actually improve this thing fast. Now, does improvement mean winning the CUSA Title and going to the Tournament? Almost certainly no. But it does give us the chance to get someone in here that could rebuild this thing quickly to at least a level that is similar to where we were toward the very end of JJ's run, where competing for a conference championship in a weak league was possible. But you need a good coach, preferably one who has skins on the wall somewhere--IOW, not another Tony Benford-type coach. And there's the ultimate rub--we have the absolute worst AD in the country to do the picking and leading of this, a guy who might be able to pick out awesome Domino's managers, but can't pick out winning coaches in revenue sports. Literally, the man is kryptonite for this kind of coach. And he isn't going anywhere, so he gets yet another hire to make, that surely will get a 5-year deal, and then we have to deal with the reality that if he sucks as a coach, we are stuck--again--with a coach we have to watch just throw gas onto the fire. Its just a tough reality we face, mostly because we make it our own reality to not face it...

I'm just throwing this out there, but do you have an alternate username that you post under that goes by the name "Ben Gooding"?

Hall did start the next two seasons after Smith led us to a bowl victory in 2002. Hall was our starter in both 2003 and 2004.

I think Vizza would have been our best, if he had stayed--assuming he didn't get killed any worse than he already had behind Dodge's porous OLines. Andrew Smith is interesting because he seemed much more athletic than what he was allowed to show in the Buick offense, but I always felt that Scott Hall would start over him when healthy. He could have been great if he hadn't died in that car accident, but its just hard to say if he would have excelled as the main QB under Dickey for a full year or more. Jason Mills was the kind of guy who would throw 4 of the worst interceptions that a QB could throw in a game, but would follow it up with a 300+ yard passing performance. Very erratic. He was Derek Thompson before DT ever showed up on campus.

Since 1995, would Scott Hall win the poll as best QB we have had here since returning to I-A/FBS?

How did you get the talking points memo? I thought you were just here to have a good time, win or lose (but usually lose)...

Attendance last night?

UTSA, allow us to introduce you to our head coach in a revenue sport that was known as a "recruiter" at a Power school before we hired him to come here...his name is Tony Benford. This is basically who you just hired to run your football program. Good luck with all that...

Greer might have been a good starter at a Division II or III college. McNulty probably would have been a starter at a bad FCS school. Smith would probably be an All-American at a FCS school.

So, in finality now, there is absolutely no doubt that TCU getting into the Big XII is a miracle. Talk about winning the lottery--they get to be a great G5 team, somehow parlay that into a Rose Bowl bid against Wisconsin that they win, time that with Texas A&M leaving the Big XII to go to the SEC, and have the other Big XII North schools demand that they get another team in Texas to play for recruiting purposes. Teeny, tiny private school in Ft. Worth that got left behind by the Big !2's original Texas crew, they are now in the club. For how long? Who knows, but if you are a UH fan, you have to ask yourself just exactly how did we get the shaft here? Just amazing. TCU and Utah all got bumps upward from the G5 to the P5. The other former Big East schools that moved away caused the league to fold up into the AAC, but they were always power schools in a power league. Now, UConn, Cincy, and USF all got kicked backwards and cannot seem to get any traction to move up to a P5 league. Those are your biggest winners and losers in realignment, by far, actually...

Jason Attaway was a walk-on QB from Sanger. He started for us in Dickey's opener at OU. Led us to victories over Boise State twice and Texas Tech in 1998 and 1999. He was the closest QB in that list to Greer and McNulty and yet was still miles ahead of either of them. McNulty just wasn't very good, but he was mentally tough. Greer might have had some talent when he got here, but when facing a real FBS defense, he looked scared to death. Greer actually made McNulty look less awful, which was not too easy to do.

Its a tough sell because of the losing. That is all that TX HS Coaches, players, and their parents know us for, which doesn't help that we always start the season early with bodybag whippings at regional P5 powers that have plenty of T-shirts around to put us down. Of course, when we finally step out of playing SEC and Big 12 powers and actually play a team that we normally would compete with fairly well in Iowa, we play their best team in decades and start the worst QB we have had in decades and get murdered. But with future games at Florida, Texas A&M, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Iowa, its not gonna stop anytime soon. I understand the need for the bodybag game, since almost every G5 plays at least one, but I'd have been scheduling games at every team in the northern reaches of the country, like Washington, Minnesota, Maryland, Syracuse, etc...if you get killed by them, there aren't tons of kids walking the hallways at your normal Texas HS wearing t-shirts of those schools. but when you get beat 65-0 by UT, 56-3 by LSU, 79-10 by OU, and whatever Arkansas and A&M beat us by in the years to come, those t-shirt fans in HS don't exactly have a huge reason to look at UNT as their primary school to root for, even if they end up going there because its closer to home or cheaper than anywhere else.

I figure that you have these G5 schools that would be available for conferences to be more regionalized in the future: Marshall, ODU, Appy State, Charlotte, FIU, FAU, Georgia State, Georgia Southern, MUTS, WKU, UAB, South Alabama, Troy, USM, ULL, ULM, La Tech, Arkansas State, Tulsa, Rice, UTEP, NMSU, UTSA, Texas State, and UNT. Add in SMU and Tulane, just as they may not quit football altogether, and it gives you 27 teams. Easily, the SW division would be UNT, SMU, Tulsa, UTEP, NMSU, Texas State, UTSA, Rice, and Arky State. The SE division would be La Tech, Tulane, ULM, ULL, USM, UAB, USA, Troy, and MUTS. The Eastern Division would be Marshall, ODU, WKU, Charlotte, Appy State, Georgia State, Georgia Southern, FIU, and FAU. The farthest point of travel in the SW division would be NMSU to Arkansas State. Right now, NMSU has to travel to Appy State for its farthest point. The farthest point in the SE would be MUTS to ULL. Right now, MUTS has to play in El Paso or South Florida for furthest conference trips. And in the East, the farthest is Marshall to F_U, which they already do and won't have to travel to El Paso anymore. This is the reality of what regionalization will be like within ten years for our level of college play, give or take a few subtractions and a few FCS move-ups.

McNulty and Greer are both, without a shade of doubt in my mind, the worst QBs that we have had to start a season in my 25 years of following the team. Scott Davis, Wendell Moseley, Mitch Maher, Jason Mills, Jason Attaway, Scott Hall, Daniel Meager, Riley Dodge, and Derek Thompson were all better to MUCH better than those two guys.

Not a one. It was obvious that when a new coach would get here that these guys would be leaving or just staying buried on the depth chart. If you couldn't play QB in the Metamucil Offense, it was obvious you couldn't play. Greer absolutely sucked as a FBS QB, Damarcus Smith was too erratic, McNulty only played because Grandpa loved him, and Means and Shanbour couldn't jump over this collection of QBs that probably wouldn't start at a lot of FCS schools. Alec Morris will be a breath of fresh air compared to this list, even if he is just average.

I really think the G5s and FCS teams realize that the P5 money will dry up sooner rather than later. That's why their level of contentment to be "bought" is such an accepted reality. These folks--especially like RV--know that the non-revenue sports have to get paid for and it is FAR easier to just play a bodybag game every year and pack the coffers that way. What people on gmg.com want is for the university to look at itself, thru the window of athletics, to emulate UH. I mean they are an urban school in the state that is huge and has a large alumni base, just like us, so why not? Well, the why not is that UH looks at athletics as a primary window to their school. We don't--and never have. They have some great history in the two revenue sports and they have BMDs from the 60s, 70, and 80s that want UH to be big-time, like they used to be in the old SWC. We don't have anything that compares to this--not even close, actually. What many on here need to understand is that our place in college football got basically cemented by our 1-aa debacle. Even if we had a better AD for the last 15 years to make us more revenue and successful in coaching hires, we weren't ever going to jump UH or SMU on the college football landscape because of their pedigree and SWC media still backing them. We couldn't jump into a league WITH SMU and UH because they refused to have us, much less go past them. What is realistic for us in the years ahead is to prepare for the regionalization of college football on the lower levels. Some, like I mentioned with the MAC and the MWC, have already embraced this reality. The other three G5 leagues have not. I suspect that some will drop football if they cannot make Power Independence work for football, just for the sake of not allowing themselves to be "lowered" to permanent status in the G5/FCS collection. SMU and Tulane are two schools that immediately come to mind in that vein of thought. Apogee and the Super Pit are wonderful venues, no doubt. And we will be playing in them for years to come. But it would be very wise to understand that our place in the college athletics landscape is not going to be with the Power Conference teams or even those that could get affiliated with them because of their budgets and history. If we hadn't basically give up on I-a football in the early 80's, it could very well be different today, but we didn't do that and it killed off too many resources (i.e., giving fans and alumni). Its a lot like the guy who never saved his entire work life and now wants to retire in the next ten years and live like his buddies do because of how much they saved. In the end, you can save more for the next decade, but your buddies got a large head start on you that will never allow you to catch up. At that point, it becomes all about changing your expectations to a more realistic view. That's what we have here now. We can still enjoy Mean Green sports, but its not going to be against the teams we all dream of them playing against on a level field. Its just not how college sports works.

The original CUSA had Louisville, Marquette, DePaul, Cincy, South Florida, Memphis, Charlotte, UAB, USM, Tulane, and Houston. That was a great collection of traditional basketball powers. Then the old Big East poached away Louisville, Marquette, DePaul, and Cincy, replacing them with SMU, UTEP, Marshall, Rice, Tulsa, ECU, and UCF. Certainly a drop down in hoops power, but Memphis was still kicking ass in the Calipari years. But then the AAC takes away UCF, USF, UH, Tulsa, Tulane, Memphis, and ECU. Schools like UAB, WKU and UTEP, as well as improving programs like ODU, La Tech and MUTS, and programs that are down now but used to be good like Charlotte and USM, have to look at us, UTSA, Rice, Marshall, FAU, and FIU, and just cry at what we are doing to their RPI and the conference's RPI.

Just passed the legislation to allow for a 10-team conference to have a championship game. Welp, UH, I guess you are gonna continue to enjoy the AAC for a while...

Yeah, CUSA was very poachable by the AAC, once the Big East fell apart. Most of the AAC's parts that are valuable to other conferences all got picked off (Rutgers, Pitt, Syracuse, WVU, TCU, and Louisville) and they had to replace them with the best of what was left--UH, SMU, UCF, ECU, Temple, Memphis, Navy, Tulane, and Tulsa all joined with UConn, USF,and Cincy. If you got left behind in CUSA, its only because you either had no TV value at all or your geography hurt you--see UAB, USM, Marshall, Rice, and UTEP. What CUSA added were teams like La Tech and WKU that fit the mold of the other CUSA teams that had to stay behind because of small markets, but the rest of the adds were simply based on TV markets. The only problem with that is that the college football world doesn't give one rip about us, UTSA, F_U, MUTS, ODU, or Charlotte, nor do they give a rip about any SBC school. To me, this is where the MWC and MAC have it right in doing everything geographically. The MAC schools know what they are, which is a collection of schools that are able to make each other better because of the tightness of the geography around most of their membership--i.e., travel costs are better for teams and fans. The MWC, while more spread out, obviously, still have some very strong rivalries and easier travel amongst its membership than anything the SBCUSAAAC teams have--that's all because the teams in the South all want to look down their noses at other schools instead of being conference mates with them (see SMU-UNT, UTEP-NMSU, La Tech--ULM) for recruiting purposes. It figuratively cuts off your individual nose to spite your conference face...

I doubt that they will add anyone ever, just from a payout standpoint, but if they added two teams, you can almost certainly bet it would be Cincy and Memphis. Should it be HOuston? Yes, but its not gonna happen because they add nothing new to the conference from a TV standpoint and a recruiting standpoint. I would see the AAC adding MUTS to replace Memphis with Nashville's market and NIU or Ohio to replace Cincy, which would leave the MAC at 12 teams and force us to add one team, which would most likely be ULL.