untjim1995

#UNTADforlife

Oh I agree--but back a few years ago when Nebraska was in the Big XII, they did play twice at Southern Miss. Nowadays, they won't play anyone that is G5 outside of Lincoln, which is becoming an almost unwritten rule for a lot of P5s. About a year ago, Nebraska and Northern Illinois signed a 4-for-1 series, with 1 game in Chicago against NIU and the other 4 in Lincoln. But after the B1G Ten went to their plan of scheduling at least one P5 in OOC play, that NIU "home" game got bought out, meaning the series became NIU traveling to Lincoln 4 times between 2017 and 2023 with no return game. Nebraska just makes too much from a home game and need at least two, if not three, home games to pay their bills .Going forward, Nebraska's road games in the future are at Miami this season, at Oregon in 2017, at Colorado in 2019, at Oklahoma in 2021, at Colorado in 2023, and at Tennessee in 2027. The funny thing is that they do have a "series" with Cincy, playing them at home in 2020 and returning to Cincy in 2025. But that game may have two possibilities to why it was scheduled--recruiting purposes in the middle of your new conference in a big market, as well as the very real probability that Cincy will be a P5 at some point. There is no doubt that the Cincy game could easy get bought out if they aren't an opponent that helps them by 2025. Otherwise, Nebraska's home OOC games are the following: 2015 BYU, South Alabama, Southern Miss, 2016 Fresno State, Wyoming, and Oregon, 2017 Arkansas State and NIU, 2018 Akron, Colorado, and Troy, 2019 South Alabama & NIU. My point is that Nebraska is the type of big name that could've been offered something in return for a game at Jerry World or The Cotton Bowl, with games against a bodybag that might actually be more competitive than against Southern P5 giants. Now, that cat is out of the bag. Just to give you a few future schedules to realize that we cannot schedule any of these current or former Big XII teams now, Colorado plays at Hawaii this year and at Air Force in 2022 but they always play Colorado State in a series every year. Mizzou plays @‌ Arky State this year, @‌ UConn in 2017, at Memphis in 2021, and at MUTS in 2022 KU is booked to go to Memphis in 2016, Ohio in 2017, Central Michigan in 2018, and Houston in 2019. KSU plays at UTSA in 2015, but no other games at G5s after this. And OSU plays at Central Michigan this week, @‌ South Alabama in 2017, at Tulsa in 2019, and at Boise State in 2021. And, just for grins, Iowa State plays at Toledo this year, @‌ Akron in 2017, @‌ UNLV in 2021, and @‌ Arkansas State in 2025. At this point, I just want to see solid G5s get scheduled here--that includes BYU, who I actually think is a P5 name, but I don't believe that a P5 will come here for many reasons. They include the reality of a future P5 complete split, conferences mandating non-road games against G5s, and the AD that wants no part of scheduling anyone beyond the SMU and Army series at home, beyond an FCS game. I believe that Army series will either get extended or we will replace them with a series against Air Force, which will guarantee a lot of butts-in-seats...

If we had gotten into the SWC club, back in the late 70s, I think the following would have happened: 1.) Hayden Fry would've stayed. He was a Texan and would have loved coaching in the SWC again. 2.) We probably would've been a middle of the pack team in the SWC of that time, which is no slight. From 1977-1989, Arkansas, Texas, A&M, Baylor, SMU, and Houston were ranked highly at different times, and each appeared in The Cotton Bowl as the SWC Champion. 3.) It would have avoided our "death moment"--the I-aa drop. I don't think anyone with a straight face can argue that only SMU's actual death penalty precipitated a bigger fall from grace within 5 years of their high point than what we did from 1978 to 1983. 4.) Being in the SWC of that time, even when Arkansas left and Texas and A&M looking to head out, too, we would have ended up, at worst, in CUSA with UH. I don't think we would've ended up in the Big 12, only because we didn't have any political ties like Baylor and Tech had. But, and here's the huge what if, the Big Eight could've looked at the changing landscape and recognized we need a presence in the DFW TV Market, especially when Arkansas left to the SEC. North Texas would've been a great fit for the old Big Eight. They would've had nine opponents, so your league would have a balanced schedule every year. You get a huge TV market in a large alumni base for almost every single school in the conference, and you would have a chance to recruit Texas HS kids much easier, since OU and to a lesser degree, OSU, were able to do. Colorado got great when they started scheduling UT and A&M in OOC play because that was their way to getting into the Texas HS ranks--that led to some great recruits that got them a national title. 5.) We would be in the AAC today, at a minimum. And SMU, as well as probably TCU, would be in CUSA or the MWC instead. Old CUSA would've never gone after SMU or TCU because they already would've had UNT, meaning that they were blocked instead of us, unless we opened up the market to one or both of them. I doubt that the conference would have wanted that. Only the WAC had SMU and TCU together, and as soon as TCU got good, they jumped to the old CUSA, which then led to a jump to the MWC, which allowed SMU to get the CUSA bid. If we had been there all along, who knows how that would've transpired. One thing I do know is that the pure "give-up" of what occurred at UNT from 1979 until 1994 just haunts us. It basically killed the program in the eyes of so many in the state and area. Even today, a lot of people think of us as being on par with SFA than they do SMU...

I don't think that you're gonna have to worry about this bolded statement anytime soon...as in probably the next decade, if not forever. They don't because the venue is too small and they already play a game here in the Metroplex every year, sometimes even two because of TCU being here. SMU got A&M as part of a deal because of two things: they needed games in Texas to play since the SEC moved them away, and the Ponies and Aggies are still SWC connected. The Aggies never play Rice in Houston because of proximity to their school, but UT does because that's there only game to play in Houston every other year. Back when a P5 game could've been scheduled home-and-home here, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Kansas, Colorado, Mizzou, and even Nebraska could have been great targets, especially Mizzou, Nebraska, and Colorado, which all gave up their Texas ties for other conferences. And you cannot tell me that OSU wouldn't love having a game every year in DFW to recruit to and get their large alumni base out to watch when they play at TCU and then here, if it got scheduled. But we got SMU and Army and that was it--game over, schedule work is done, except for the easy part of choosing which bodybag to bend over for and which small-time FCS opponent to bend over every year. And tha's how you get to be #UNTADforlife...

I think we will see him, too, but unless Minimac gets hurt, it probably won't be until the Portland State game, at the earliest.

You just won the internet, sir...well played, yet probably dead-on in its truthfulness, too. #UNTADforlife

Yes, this was the low point as being a FBS program. Freaking SWC cellar-dweller Rice beat us in a game where they just literally stop trying in the 4th quarter--not part of the 4th quarter or most if, but all of it... If Bailiff had wanted to be a total ass, Rice would have scored somewhere between 98 and 105 points, even with their backups that day. It was a bitter pill to swallow, as we knew then that the Dodge experiment was absolutely, almost frighteningly, not working. When he went 2-10 in his third year, I thought for sure that his days as our head coach were done. To save $300k, we brought him back instead, so he could get another 1 win and 6 losses under his belt before getting canned...

Well, in their defense, Texas was just an unbelievable team last year...oh wait!!

Here's mine: What if we had beaten Memphis in the 2003 NO Bowl, which would have finished off a 10-3 season, including an absolute destruction of Baylor, and a 31 point loss to an OU team that lost in the national championship game and had beaten Texas 65-13 and A&M 77-0? I am fairly certain we would have ended the season ranked and Dickey would've gotten hired away, like he believed he would. I'd like to think that we could've made a good hire for the program, as well as to get the funding for a new stadium going in this scenario, but then I think about the realities of the situation, even if we had won and finished ranked, and I still cannot imagine either of those things occurring.

I actually think the shelf life on these P5s buying G5s and FCS opponents is less than 10 years. You've already seen some P5 conferences abandon FCS opponents, while others have made the commitment to only play a certain number of G5 opponents in OOC play. The playoff system, especially once it gets expanded to 8, will give these teams reason o be able to schedule even harder in OOC play, if they wish, because a loss or two won't kill them like it could before. But, to reiterate your point, games at Iowa and Wisconsin are great. Games at SEC/Big XII/ACC Southern schools are terrible.

Just on the schedule alone, a 4-8 season would be an improvement from last year, even though we finished 4-8. We just played 4 teams that were as bad as college football opponents as you could draw in 2014. A 5+ win this season would be a real good sign that this thing is moving back into the right direction. I still think 3-4 wins this year is where I believe this team will finish. Next year, all things equal, I'd like to us get back to 5-6 wins, and then be ready to have another great year in 2017, similar to 2013.

Most G5s face apathy, huh? I'll take the apathy in any other G5 place, on a per-student or per-fan basis, over ours any day. You'd have to know what its been like around here to understand the history. In the early 70s, we voted to get rid of football, but it barely missed getting dropped. In the 80s, we let the program get dropped down to 1-aa. In the 90s, we added 10k aluminum seats that are farther away from the field than almost any seat at Apogee just to get back up to I-A so we can get bigger paychecks from more bodybag opponents. In the 00's, we kept a coach on the sidelines for a 4th year, despite racking up a whopping 5-31 record in his first three years here. Not even one of those things happens if apathy doesn't rule the day here. If there's a next AD around anytime in the next decade, which I highly doubt, if they don't know what the hell they are facing in apathy here, from an alumni that is detached to put it mildly, to a local citizenry that doesn't give two craps about our program, to a student body that is almost trained to not give a damn about athletics by the faculty, alumni, and local residents, they will learn real fast how things work here. Apathy isn't an excuse---its a mindset. All of the excuses you hear all come from the biggest issue we have--apathy. Even winning in the 70s, 00's, or in 2013 didn't do anything to the apathy that has a stranglehold around here.

Maybe we can, but the closest I've seen us finish in a bodybag game against an SEC or Big XII opponent on the road was at Georgia, where we lost by 24 points and had the best team we have fielded in at a dozen years, arguably in 35+ years. Otherwise, I expect that we will get a huge check, go down to open the season, and get pounded. Anything above that, as history has taught me, would be just awesome gravy. Seeing 79-10, 65-0, 63-7, 56-3, etc.., .scores that I've seen OU, UT, LSU, and Bama lay on us.

I don't either, but I think Rice and WKU are like those road opponents I listed--they are just better than us right now.

I would rather us play a bodybag game against USC than this game. The Aggies don't need anymore T-shirt fandom from our students and alumni, nor do the UNT alumni need yet another regional bodybag opponent's fans to laugh at us for years. This game, albeit for $1.25 million, does just that. Can't we just play Nebraska or Oregon and have the same effect?

I think 5-7 is the absolute ceiling for this thing--that's winning all three of you 50/50 games with USM, UTSA, and UTEP, plus winning at SMU and Portland State. If we get to 6 wins this year or better, Mac should be given Coach of the Year--to do that with McNulty as the QB, a young OL, and a defensive front that is still not very deep, at least to me, would seem amazing to even think about. If I thought we could play better on the road, I'd say that 5 wins or better is possible, but trips to Southern Miss, Marshall, La Tech, and MUTS don't add up to multiple victories. On the other side, a loss at SMU would almost ensure a record of absolutely no better than 2-10, with a real probability of 1-11. SMU will not be more talented than anyone else on our schedule, except for Portland State.

RV is just a symptom of the main illness, apathy. Don't get me wrong, he's not a good AD for our circumstances currently, but a lot of that is because he is a "company man", just staying in budget and keeping a smile on his face even if he wants to publically complain. But its the apathy, which has prevailed for decades, that just kills us. Most of the students, alumni, and local citizens are told that athletics at UNT is a waste, both in time and money. So they follow someone else, never to be seen or heard from again as potential UNT fans. That apathy is a cancer tot he entire university, not just athletics, but getting as many students as possible to be here for a "value" degree bring that mindset around, especially now that they are children of alumni who felt the same way in the 80s and 90s as students themselves. RV is just a by-product of that mindset, nothing more, nothing less. The I-aa fiasco was the point where apathy put the program on life support. Yes, we are not on life support anymore, but the apathy is what we still deal with, just taking medication to endure it. Only thing that could potentially fix the problem forever is to take an exploratory surgery, i.e. increasing funding to buy out bad hires and enable winning as the only thing that is acceptable here, but it will take money and commitment, which you do have, but you are afraid to spend it on something that isn't known. The problem is that you cannot get better with that illness and you have beneficiaries that just want you to die off so they can get the extra resources for themselves. The BOR and administration are the only ones who can fix this--they have to take it to the alumni, students, faculty, and the local citizens and tell them (not sell them) what they are going to be doing. Changing the mindset from just fielding a team to winning will take a lot of time, energy, and resources, but we believe its an untapped source of possibility in terms of revenue production for the entire university. Otherwise, the patient is going to eventually die, no matter what. We can go down trying or we can just let the disease finish the job. FIFY

I just think that you can use the SMU series a lot better for scheduling than we do. Like this year, the AD gets to argue correctly that UNT fans get to watch their team for 6 very easy-to-attend games this year. The problem is that you give the donors and fans Portland State to go along with that SMU game. My point would be that in 2020, which is now the earliest it can be done, is to go after BYU and look at signing a home-and-home with them, with BYU playing here first in 2020, along with SMU, and at Army, and at P5 bodybag. Then in 2021, when you play Army here, at bodybag, and at BYU, but you get the neutral-site game at SMU, which is all that game will ever be since they have no fanbase. In 2022, the Army series will be over, you still have SMU and the bodybag game, but you can work on two decent home-and-home series, doing it to where you have a good OOC team at home in the years you play in Dallas, so you still have 6 easy games to watch us play, as well as SMU and another team, such as Air Force, to play here, then return that game in the year you play at SMU. The other benefit is you aren't giving up some of your bodybag money to buy a game with Podunk State, since we apparently need every cent we can get to cover the budget. Or just continue to play bad FCS teams that don't prepare you for anyone else on your schedule, don't get anyone extra to travel to Apogee to watch the game, and get absolutely no media coverage for it. If the dozen or so big monied-donors like this because it lets them rub elbows with their pal, RV, and the rest of the BOR here, then that's how it goes, I guess. And that would be soooooo North Texas to keep doing that, as well.

4-8 @‌SMU, Portland State, UTSA, and UTEP

The lighting is priority #1, then getting rid of the press row that is waaayyyy to big, and then the signage outside needs major improvement. But I'd have rather them spent $650k and bought out Benford after last season and used $4.8 million for renovations now.

If NDSU keeps it up, they are going to be a MAC team one of these days. That would be a nice pickup for that league, actually. I'd be willing to bet they would compete very well in the MAC. Hell, they have beaten all of the northern big 12 schools in recent years.

We tried to tell you that Damarcus Smith wasn't going to start here anytime soon. But even I didn't think that Mac and Chico would bury him behind Greer...I think its amazing that any decent QB cannot move past McNulty on a depth chart, but its even more telling that he couldn't beat out Josh Greer on a depth chart, both for the player and his coaches...Sorry but those top QBs are not anywhere close to being in the top 2 QBs on another FBS roster. Hell, Dajon was better than either of them, and he can't even play QB at D-2 Texas A&M Commerce, apparently.

This was very underrated, sir...I lol'd. Mean Green Star for you!!

The SMU game is vitally important for us because they are also so bad. But they have the excuse of a brand new coach, we don't. I just look at the SMU game as the most important game of the season--not because they're our "rival", but because they should be a win for us on a schedule that doesn't openly offer you many of them. If you lose to them, you are looking at no more than 3 wins this season, with the very real probability of just one win. A 1-11 or 2-10 season, on the heels of a disastrous 4-8 year where you program really regressed, especially at QB, would just be a catastrophe. Apparently we have no choice but to run out the contract on Mac, who would still have three years remaining on his $650k annual deal. If you think recruiting is bad now and that the fanbase is sad considering our numbers, imagine what things will look like if the scenario above occurs. You won't have 5000 people at some of those FCS and late season CUSA games in the years to come if we fall apart this season and we are financially stuck. Obviously, the exact opposite could happen--we improve this year and develop some depth, turn that into a better season next year, then have a winning season like 2013 again in 2017. That's very possible, too, which would hopefully bring out more fans and hopefully get our recruiting to move up.