untjim1995

I don't know you and vice versa. But this post says a lot about your character, flyonthewall. I, too, have had instances where I said things in haste that I regretted. Taking the time to walk those comments back, even as hard as it can be for our pride sometimes, is very telling. I bet its why you have a successful business. I agree on everything you say in this post, except for kinda blaming Mitchell, although I felt the exact same way you did about his lack of trying under Benford versus JJ, but losing does that people, both in sports and in life. We want our athletes to have the Michael Jordan attitude when it comes to losing, that you hate it so much that you just won't ever allow yourself or your teammates to get mired in it. But, truthfully, as we witness with the Cowboys every year in December, used to see with the Mavs in playoff time, and now see in the Rangers in September, once losing in the clutch time starts, its awfully hard to stop. And this is with paid pro athletes, not scholarship college kids. They hear the media ask them over and over about losing in the clutch times, even when it was in the past and your record YTD is really good. The fans respond with the negativity and the atheltes and the coaches feel that extra pressure, which leads to teh Cowboys sucking every December, the Rangers falling apart in September, and when the Mavs would have a great team int he regular season, only to get bounced in the first round by some team that really wasn't as good as them. It takes a very special team that gets over that hump (See Mavs of 2011). Otherwise, you get the Cowboys of the last 8 years or so and the Rangers of the last few years. UNT will always have a harder road to pave, just because of the culture and history here, which is not good. So when winning actually shows up, as it did with Fry in the 70s, Dickey in the early 00s, and JJs teams in the last 5 years of his tenure, the hardcore UNT fans are fired up because they feel like this is FINALLY our time, especially as we watch other lukewarm-at-best fans get interested in our team instead of name your AQ school that has not ties to them. But once losing comes back into the fold, at a place like UNT, it isn't a slow fade, its been a cliff dive. And the players know it, especially a guy like Tony Mitchell that knew that playing out the string was better for him since he was going to get paid soon. Again, that falls on the coach and the AD to fight that off, but it becomes harder as you go from 4000 people watching your SBC game to having 2000 watching your SBC game. Losing does that--and as previously stated, the AD and the BOR need to address this quickly or it becomes an avalanche here in Denton because of that culture and history we carry with us. Its not hard to blame college kids for giving less than the effort they should, but we know that pro players do it everyday, and they are supposedly more mature since they are older. I just find that when the AD of your school blames the kids for a huge dropoff instead of his hire, which was approved by the BOR, that he has a year to be proven right or else that AD should have major responsibility for blaming the kids instead of his hire. This year, the record may have improved, but anyone wathcing knows that the team's performance isn't inspiring anyone to back Benford any further. That falls at the feet of the AD at almost every other school in America, unless they don't care about that sport or are trying to save money. Neither option tells your fanbase anything good. BTW, our friends in College Station are dealing with this now, with the obvious retainment of Billy Kennedy as their head BB coach, despite coaching them from being a regular in the NCAA Tournament down to being a dying program in a bad basketball league. And they have no excuse with all the money that they have in Aggieland for accepting this. And it will hurt their program significantly. But, again, they will always have money to go buy a decent head coach when they are ready, which we don't have. It stinks when you realistically expect more for your school's revenue teams than they are willing to do to make that happen. You mentioned Todd Dodge in your earlier post, so I want to say something there about him. I, too, felt he was a great hire at the time. You have someone who was affordable for our situation (with Fouts as your stadium, you had very limited resources), had great name recognition, had coached here before, and had lots of in-roads with Texas HS coaches. Plus, he was a great guy for the alumni to be around and get in front of a TV, unlike his predecessor. But, just like with Vic Trilli, who was everything that Dodge was with the fans and with the media, once it was obvious that this was just not gonna work, you have to pull the trigger and move on. Not doing that, in both cases, cost us so much more than the buyouts of that extra year ended up costing the bottom line. As a successful businessman, you know that sometimes ventures or purchases just don't work out. It stinks, too. No one likes it when it happens. But you move on as fast as possible. You don't tell your business partners or shareholders that we will just have to keep that manufacturing equipment for another few years, even though we have lost several contracts and potential new business because its not any good. If you do that, you are rightfully setting yourself up to be fired or to suffer greatly. That is where I am with Tony Benford. Look, if he has to come back, I get it--I understand the financial realities here, too. But if I am the AD, I am making it really well known that if he cannot get significant improvement this next year--as in top 4 in the league--we will cut bait this year. I don't go on to various media outlets and make it sound like we are improving and you are happy. I'm saying,"Although I see improvement, we are far from being where we need to be and where we were. I accept the blame for this and I know that Coach Benford knows that we expect to get back up to where we were very soon." The fanbase would do backflips to hear this from the AD. And, I suspect, that a man of your character and work ethic, would love to hear that, too. We all on gmg.com that regularly post want the same thing--for UNT to be the best it can be in sports. We want to brag to our friends that actually went to UT, A&M, Tech, OU, and the others who get our alums as fans because we haven't shown a consistent plan for actually caring about revenue sports fully. The HoD Bowl was a great experience for us. The UT opener will be a better opportunity for us in a game against an AQ power than we have probably ever had to at least be competitive and we know what that means for us. But when D-II Alabama-Huntsville beats you, when you have to struggle to beat Northwood or Wayland Baptist at home in Year 2, and when you have to realize that a good SFA team has gotten to the point where they can come to Denton and beat you by 30+ points in front of as many fans rooting for them as are there to root for the home team (not LaTech, not UTEP, not Rice...Stephen Freaking Austin), you have to realize that this operation is in dire danger of causing severe complications that cannot or are not going to be recoverable. And, again, most of us on gmg.com, whether we are new or old, are in agreement that we definitely don't want that to happen again to one of our teams.

OK--I'll play devil's advocate here. When we had a great run for our school's basketball program, we drew an average of about 4k in the last season of JJ being here, a year where we didn't go to the postseason yet again. When SMU has their FIRST winning season in years, they start getting sellouts at Moody Coliseum as the season moves forward. Imagine what it will look like for them all season long next year if they are going to be as good as many think they will be? In one freaking year, Moody Coliseum has become "the" place to be for the Dallas locals during that time of the year when the Cowboys are officially out of the playoffs (last weekend of the year) and before the Rangers get up and rolling. Is it something that can continue? Who knows--Larry Brown is a great college coach, even if he is nearing 80, and his top assistant, Tim Jankovich, is a very solid coach. Their future is very bright, at least in my opinion, which absolutely sucks to type out on a post. If our football program beat them a lot in the upcoming series--and they dont buy it out--and we keep going to bowl games, then we may have the ability to move up ahead of them in the conference affiliation game. But the only conference with out there that has that potential to be better than the AAC year-in and year-out and has a solid media reputation is the MWC. To me, if you can get invited out there, you can work to duplicate TCUs experience from their glory days, as well as improve GREATLY the basketball pedigree for your school to get fans more excited and involved. No matter how good we get, it has been proven over and over that UNT attendance for games against SBCUSA opponents doesn't move the needle enough. I'd take the chance all day long to see how we could do both on the field/court and in attendance if we played the Boise State of today or the Air Force Academy at Fouts or got to host New Mexico, UNLV, or San Diego State at the Pit for a conference game. I can guarantee you that this ain't the Big West Conference redux, with UNT having Craig Helwig as the AD and Al Hurley as President. We would have a chance to do some great things out there--to follow in the footsteps of our Froggy friends to the south in FW. But the MWC is only going to get back into Texas WHEN someone in this state shows them that they are worth going after. Keeping Bumford as the coach again, just as we did with Todd Dodge in football, isn't showing anyone that we are interested in doing anything with a significant revenue sport than just controlling costs as best as possible. Extending McCarney and JJ back in the day were the best things we have done in a looongggg time, leadership wise in the AD, and if Mac can continue to build this thing up, which I believe he will do, then you can really say that this is a different day at UNT--we reward winning, we focus on it, and we won't accept losing. Right now, we have shown that we will reward winning by extending coaches, and we are showing that we are focusing more on keeping the best coaching talent we can by increasing coaching salaries and improving facilites. But to be able to show others that we care so much about winning that we can stand anything less than that, we are going to have to change this acceptability of "well, he still has 2+ years left on the contract and we cannot afford to buy him out, so we gotta just take our chances that he will do a 180 and show some improvement." That costs more in the long run than the buyout does, as evidenced by the Vic Trilli and Todd Doge fiascos. Sadly, we are stuck with the real possibility that Tony Benford will just get added to that list and we will see our basketball program go all the way back to where it was in 2000.

USM doesn't really have any choice but to talk about CUSA in as positive a light as they can, since they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Its actually one of the sadder realities that they must deal with as time moves on. They have no TV market, they are the step-child of Mississippi, and the program that made them well-known (decades of solid upset-minded football) has fallen off the cliff just as conference realignment started changing things up for TV purposes. I remember vividly one USM poster on the CUSA board before we joined ssaying clearly that he didn't want CUSA to add Charlotte, ODU, UNT, or UTSA because he knew that once any of us got our programs moving upward, that USM would be left behind because they have no TV market to sell to other conferences. Its a tough gig in Hattiesburg, MS when your football team isn't good anymore.

I think the Big XII will eventually die off, but before it does, it will attempt to add TV markets, one of who was already mentioned, in Cincy. Plus, that will help WVU out a ton with just have a traveling companion. My belief is that the 12th team will be South Florida. You get Tampa/St. Pete for a tv market, plus recruiting to Florida ties, as well as a bowl tie-in (the Outback Bowl). If you can go out farther, its to get BYU and another bigger TV market out of the AAC--someone like Memphis, who has a great revenue sport and a bowl tie-in (Liberty Bowl). The Big 12 will eventually lose Texas, OU, OSU, Tech, and KU, which will provide the leftovers a conference that can just get added to by other MWC/AAC schools, even though it will lose the automatic qualifier status like the Big East lost its spot. As for UNT, our conference affiliation is COMPLETELY dependent on SMU and TCU. As long as those two schools remain in their leagues, then we will have a spot in a different league. Its just how it works in today's world of TV market affiliation. Its also why Rice will never be in a conference with UH ever again. The best case scenario for UNT, to me, is to get a MWC invite with UH, UTEP, and UTSA down the road. We get good Texas schools to be with that should be peer institituitions and we get UNM, CSU, AFA, UNLV, Boise State, and San Diego State, amongst others to play against in football and basketball. That beats the hell out of playing Rice, UTSA, and La Tech every year with the SBCUSA teams. That is about the best bet we could ever ask for, since the AAC will poach other teams from CUSA as soon as they lose other teams along the way, like Cincy, USF, UConn, and Memphis, meaning we lose Rice, MUTS, Marshall, and a F_U twin to them, leaving us even further in the dust--again.

Correct me I'm wrong, but here at UNT, the AD doesn't have final say on the pick, correct? Because I've been told over and over that RV didn't hire Shanice Stephens, Bataille did. That hiring McCarney and Benford were done by Rawlins... If this is right, then RV doesn't deserve complaints, he deserves pity. And you really have to ask if he left his pride behind for a paycheck if he cannot hire (and presumabll, fire) coaches for revenue sports. No way I could see ADs at other peer universities running an athletic department without that kind of sway or influence.

This is a moot point, folks. RV ain't going anywhere. He's here for as long as he wants to be. If I were him, I'd work as long as they'll keep paying me. He has it made here. The BOR loves him because he makes little noise about additional athletic spending. Yes, facilities have greatly improved, especially the stadium, but UNTFlyer led that because it was clear that RV being involved would torpedo the operation. I still think that the BOR cannot believe that UNT students voted to build a football stadium. I just don't think that opening up tailgating in parking lots or getting SMU to come to Denton as part of a series, as awesome as they are, makes RV a lifetime AD. I think scheduling in football and basketball sucks and his track record on hires for revenue sports has been dreadful. If he had gotten Apogee funded and built back in 2003 or so, I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on all of this, but knowing that it failed miserably and in true UNT fashion, the leaders here didn't even TRY AGAIN to launch another attempt at getting rid of that toilet bowl known as Fouts is very telling. Literally, a small minority of students who managed to run about as stealth of a campaign as possible, saved UNT Football as a FBS program. But my issue is that the university's leadership should have gotten this done on their own, just l ike it gets done at every other Texas university that plays FBS football. Just like when it became clear that we couldn't get into the SWC back in the late 70s and Hayden Fry left town, our leadership literally gave up on sports, allowing us to drop down to 1-aa purgatory for 12 freaking years and making us join a podunk conference with Texas schools that almost everyone looked down at as being smalltime. Its that track record of just quitting or going half-ass on revenue athletics that kills the spirit--it makes alumni who care about sports want to go elsewhere with their fandom, giving other colleges in this state that have no funding issues even more money.

How can you expect a program to reach such lofty standards as the CUSA 2.0 Elite Eight in just the second season of Benford's coaching career? RV certainly knows that making it to 10th place instead of 15th place is progress toward the ultimate goal of possibly reaching the Elite Eight--of the CUSA 2.0 Tournament.

Rice is no Alabama-Huntsville...

Lots of genius here...made me laugh since its where my dad went to high school back in the 60s. Come to think of it, Trimble Tech has just as many unshared conference championships in college football as Texas Tech since 1960...

But RV opened up space for tailgating before games so he is the smartest AD we have ever had...(sarcasm inserted) Again, RV looks great compared to what we had before because he literally jumped over a curb-sized hurdle to make things better here from where they were. Seriously, looking at RV compared to Helwig is comparing a Ford Focus to a bicycle. Is the car faster than the bike? Of course, but we have people here who want us to believe that RV is a BMW...

By now, you know the answer to this question. As you can read in my recent post on another thread--its a cost containment question. Everything else is secondary.

HIs job was safe before this game even tipped off. His job would have only been unsafe if this was Year 4 instead of Year 2...

I don't argue your last point is dead-on about the devastation that another year of his could bring, but again, in the bigger realm of athletic department fundraising and PR, since we are in Texas, football drives the bus. And by bringing back a former high school coach from the wealthiest suburb in DFW that won because his kids had better everything than the kids from other high schools in the state, while having sat thru 5 wins and 31 losses in 3 f'ing years, which included our version of having a pseudo-lower division win over WKU built in during those three years, was just pure devastation. But the thing was that the kids Dodge had recruited got better WHEN they got legitimate coaching. It just took 3 years to do it. Its my belief that at UNT, if we keep Benford again (which I don't want to happen at all--I wanted him fired after last season) and he spares us to death again in his third year, his one saving grace should be that the talent that is here could be coached up and more importantly, added to with some JUCO talent, with a good hire. Now the hard part of this is the great unknown of who would be his replacement. I wouldn't trust RV to hire a dog-catcher again, much less anyone associated with coaching a basketball team. I firmly believe that Rawlins chose McCarney to come here to lead the football program back from the dead. It was alamost other-worldly to believe that UNT actually decided to do something they had done exactly once in 40 years in football or basketball--hire a coach who has actually been a successful head coach at a Division 1 university before. Shockingly, it appears that it has paid the university back immensely, since he has built the thing up into a winner, at least for now. Imagine if we did something even crazier and hired a --gasp!!--an actual experienced head coach from somewhere that people had heard of before?? I mean, if there was just a coach nearby in the area that could be offered something like this to move up in the coaching ranks for more money than anything he could make at his current place...a guy who made the NCAA Tournament while recruiting players to play on a freaking stage for most of his time as coach and would take that team and kick our ass so badly that we ran away from playing them again. But our history would suggest that Scott Cross wouldn't even get a call for soemthing like this, when we can hire a no-name assisitant that is the "recruiter" for a big name program. Tommy Newman, Jimmy Gales, Tim Jankovich, Vic Trilli, Johnny Jones, and Tony Benford. That is 6 coaches over the last 30 years. The two coaches who came here as big-time assistants that weren't recruiters on their previous staff did the best here (Jank and Johnny). And in each case we followed their "success" by hiring recruiters from Texas and Marquette. If we have to sit through another year of Benford to get a coach that has proven to be able to win at the Division 1 level, I will bite down and accept it. I'll tell you a guy who I would think could do well down here who is not a head coach right now is Doc Sadler. He's from Texas, did a good job at UTEP and got to be the head coach at Nebraska during the BIg 12 years when you played KU and Mizzou twice every year. What I fear more than anything is that we fire Benford and use that as the reason we have to hire a no-name assistant coach from some big name program who has never been a head coach before, which buries us for years--basically following Dickey with Dodge, leading to the worst program in FBS college football.

I think keeping Benford another year isn't as bad as it was for keeping Dodge around for a 4th year--and its not because I have any faith Benford will do anything better next year. Like it or not, football pays most of the bills and brings in more interest to the university than basketball does. Dodge won 5 games in his first 3 years, while losing 31, and that was only that good because brand new startup Western Kentucky was on our schedule for 3 wins. So, in theory, Dodge went 2-26 against anyone not named WKU in 3 years as head coach--and only made less than $300k per year, yet we still brought him back because we only had to buy out a minimal amount after the 4th year of the contract. Benford has killed the momentum for sure. Its been a disaster, but to me, a good coach could come here and turn this thing around again, pretty quickly. Its easier to find quality basketball talent than it is to rebuild a football program, if you have the right coach in place. So, to me, in the hell that is a comparison between Dodge and Benford, Benny wins (or loses less) against Dodge.

I hope Coach Mac brings it up for the rest of his tenure here. I don't want anyone to forget how bad we let this program get. We allowed the football program to be coached by Todd Dodge for a 4th year, while playing in the Sunbelt Conference, and playing in the toilet bowl known as Fouts. If you ever allow the program to get anywhere close to that level again, you might as well close up shop. From facilities, to conference affiliation, to coaching, and to overall funding, we are about 180 degrees away from where we were in the fall of 2010.

Oops on the 2105 typo...as you all know, typing isn't my specialty!!

Who knows if it holds up, but they have 4 commits already with 3 of them being 3* recruits, giving them a ranking of #33 in college football. I will say it again, but UTSA has a lot of potential--more than anyone else in CUSA, IMO. A lot of us may not like them, or look at them as if they are a pest, but they have done absolutely everything right, up to this point, in building up their program. I give them a lot of credit, from a personnel standpoint and from a marketing standpoint. Very solid leadership down there. http://247sports.com/Season/2015-Football/CompositeTeamRankings

Maybe it was just "Opposite Day" when he mentioned these...you know, the same "Opposite Day" that 6 year old kids like to play.

I can assure that you are in the minortiy on enjoying my spare posts, but I do appreciate the compliments!!

I think 7+ wins this upcoming year is very reasonable. The CUSA schedule isn't that tough, we play a bad FCS team at home, and then have a fellow non-AQ at home. Plus, the game at Indiana is very winnable. I see us being 2-2 in OOC (wins over SMU and Nicholls St.) then wins in CUSA play over UAB, Southern Miss, La Tech, Florida Atlantic, UTEP, and FIU. That gives us 8 wins right there. I see games at IU and UTSA as winnable, but we will probably lose somewhere besides at UT and at Rice, so those two places are my guess, as of now. Look, I think that there's not a game ont he schedule that isn't winnable, even Texas. They probably win easily, but maybe not. I watched Arky State go down and whip Mike Sherman's Aggie team in his first game there because they couldn't stop the run. Is it that out of the realm of possibility that this same thing could happen in Austin for Charlie Strong's first game with a new QB and a whole new system to learn? Not at all. Not expecting the game to be close, but this is the first bodybag game that we will play in years that I think we could at least compete in. The rest of the schedule is not filled with any great teams. Obviously, Nicholls State is our bought win, but SMU is not going to be good next year. Indiana is getting the benefit of the doubt because they are in the Big Ten, but this is the exact kind of AQ team that you want to play. Rice was good last year in conference play, but they weren't that good outside of CUSA play. No one else on our schedule even scares me a little bit. I think USM and La Tech have at least another year to go before they are competitive again. I think the Florida Airports are about what they have been in the last few years, capable of winning games at home, but not very good on the road. UTEP and UAB are terrible. UTSA is probably with Rice as the teams that I worry most about on our schedule in conference play, only because Coker and Bailiff are good coaches and knwo how to develop players, just like Coach Mac does. I bet we play in the No Bowl, Independence Bowl, or bowl game in Mobile next year, with a record of 8-4.

Its amazing how well things have worked out at this place when we hire coaches who have been actual head coaches before at a college...its just too bad that it has happened exactly twice in the last 45 years.

I should tell you guys that I am really Johnny Jones... Miss me yet??

I still believe to this day that if Baylor and TCU had switched places in the old Big XII (when it was really great) and MWC, you would have seen the exact same results for the lone private school in the Big XII and the lone Texas school in the MWC--the budget TCU had in the MWC was the highest, while Baylor's budget in the Big XII was the lowest. TCU is showing that they cannot compete week in/week out against these bigger AQ teams. And Baylor has become a great program in the Big XII when it got watered down to the level of being the weakest AQ conference. Interchangeable.

We will beat SMU at home--and I think it won't be close, either. Just my opinion--and I'm not exactly considered the eternal optimist around here...

Oh, I agree whole-heartedly on that statement. If I were the AD, though, and I was choosing a coach, I wouldn't have hired a life-long recruiter who wasn't known for x's and o's, and just happened to be a graduate of a school in my state that has superior resources to hire him away just by saying "Come Home." I have no problem hiring a coach, like Danny Kaspar, Steve Shields, or Bob Marlin and watching them succeed and take an AQ job. But I wouldn't have hired any of them if there was another university in the region that would be ready to pounce if said coach showed even a bit of success because that was their alma mater and would be an easy choice. Not one part of that scenario I just mentioned would have made Tony Benford an attractive hire, even beyond the fact that he was a recruiter, primarily, and had never even been a head coach anywhere before. Just too risky.