untjim1995

Tulsa has a great home schedule, even if the OU game will be 3/4 Sooner fans. And their hardest away game in OOC is at Colorado State. IF they could somehow upset OU at home, the rest of the schedule is very winnable--I realize they are bad right now, but that is a dream schedule for a non-AQ team.

It would end it for me, too. I watch about 2-3 regular season NBA games per year. Maybe 1-2 NHL games per year. I do watch the NFL, mostly because of living here in DFW and needing to be able to talk to clients about the sport that catches the strong majority of fans' attention, but it isn't anywhere close to being as enjoyable to watch as college football, college hoops, and MLB. Hell, the NBA and college basketball aren't even close to being the same game, from the halves to quarters, from 24 second clock to 35 second clock, and from an anything-goes- defense in college to something still nebulously called "illegal defense"...at least the NFL and college football have more similarities on rules than basketball does.

You can easily argue that we have always been on the losing side of college athletics for our existence. A lot of that is our fault, a lot is just due to the schools in our state, and a lot is due to the way the NCAA has governed college athletics. Look, if this thing goes nuclear, then pick your top 30-40 programs that make money on sports and that's who BCS Bowl Games, March Madness, and the College World Series will involve every year, wihtout any intereference from those below. Then that just turns into a pro-like setup of divisions (instead of conferences) based on geography. For example, the College West Division has USC, UCLA, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and Stanford. The College Southwest Division is Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M, LSU, and Kansas. The College Southeast Division is Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and Florida State. The College Atlantic Division is Clemson, UNC, Kentucky, Louisville, Virginia, and Georgia Tech. The College Midwest Division is Nebraska, Michigan, MIchigan State, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana. The Northeast Division is Ohio State, Penn State, Notre Dame, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Boston College. Obviously, you could add in other schools not listed, but you get the gist of it. I just listed 36 teams that are well-known for making money and being in big TV markets. Add anyone else you think fits this mold, but this is your official minor league system moving forward for the NFL and NBA, as if it wasn't already, basically.

First off, this thing, like the O'Bannon lawsuit won't get settled for a long time, so lots of things will get challenged in the court system for the near future. If this gets approved, its been a good time for North Texas Athletics, but it is over. There are about 30 NFL-lite and NBA-lite programs that can afford this. You will see those schools leave the NCAA, pay their players, get the media contracts and coverage, and we move on. A school like ours won't even keep teams that you have to pay players for, which I don't blame them a bit. I have always hated the lack of athletic support and funding this university has exhibited, but this is where I would agree wholeheartedly with the university to end the madness. College sports has become such a big business that it has just followed pro sports into the same trap that money from TV and increased ticket costs are just going to continue forever. They won't. Corporate money drives the pro leagues already, which has created the stale environment that so many teams feel at their stadiums or arenas (see Dallas Cowboys). The big donors at big colleges drive their decisions, but it gets lots of help because of the students. But the way it is going, with these increased costs, it will hit a breaking point for a majority of college kids and their parents.

SMU has done what I didn't think could ever happen--turn into something that people in North Dallas want to watch. A sellout for an NIT game? I realize its LSU, but that place was packed with what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, North Dallas fans. I wonder if SMU will become a basketball-first school now? I mean, in football, the writing is on the wall that if you aren't AQ, you don't matter much beyond your circle of fans and students who care. They aren't going to moving up anytime soon to an AQ league. If I were them, I'd put my emphasis on hoops, for sure. I know its Texas and that school has produced All-Americans in football from the 40s thru the mid 80s, but if they focused on being a basketball school first, they could very well be a team that could become a strong player nationally, just because they have a good basketball league and are able to go after some of those Texas HS recruits that always seem to leave the state.

So lets have a hypothetical. A team like Nebraska comes to us and says we want a game in Texas since we don't play here anymore and we need Texas HS recruits again. We would love to play you guys in a series, but we want to play at The Cotton Bowl. What terms would you find this acceptable? 1 for 1 only, 2 for 1 with our game down here, or a no go at all because it wouldn't involve a trip to Denton? To me, any game that involves UNT playing in the DFW area against a megapower like Nebraska, for example, even in a 2 for 1 series, would be awesome for our program. If we drew 35k UNT fans to the HoD Bowl against UNLV, a Cotton Bowl game against a team like Nebraska, during the State Fair, would easily draw a total attendance of 60k+, and it could be much higher than that. That is how I would ONLY look at a game in Dallas during the regular season as a home game replacement. I see Rice play UT at Reliant in Houston when their giant stadium could easily host the game. I've seen TCU host Oregon State and BYU at JerryWorld in recent seasons when their place would easily handle the crowd for those two opponents. I've seen Northern Illinois host Iowa and others in Chicago at Soldier Field. It seems to me that if a bigger venue could open up a "home" game against a huge OOC team that would never consider coming to Denton, then its something to go after. For anyone that we normally play--and have for future home games, Apogee is more than fine. But an AQ power with large traveling fanbases and large alumni groups in DFW would be a good fit to play at the Cotton Bowl. An SEC or Big Ten team is who comes to mind, someone like LSU, Auburn, Nebraska, Michigan State, Penn State, etc...

This is such a great move by the BOR. Very proud to have Coach Mac here. What a difference a great coach has made here!!

Thanks--that is awesome news!!!

That would be great, if it is true. I just know in the past, the Big Ten has sent a team every year, until last year, and that was only because they didn't have anyone left that was bowl-eligible. Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue, and then UNLV filled in since Penn State was on probation. But if CUSA got a bowl game every year against a Big Ten/Big 12 team, they should definitely send their champ here.

I absolutely agree, UNT90. But, I'll also add that a school president should know that the AD's job responsibility is to make the hiring decision, not to get their input and who they think is the right hire--that's why you have an AD. The President of a university isn't going to ask for the AD to make the final say on who will build an athletic dorm or facility. I'm just glad to get clarification on this. If RV couldn't even get to pick coaches and had to let the President decide, then he would have given up any pride he could ever have just to collect a paycheck.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the HoD Bowl shift between the Big 12 and CUSA each year, while the Big Ten remains the opponent every year, unless they aren't able to meet their allotment of bowl-eligible schools?

Suburbs are good now?

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.