untjim1995

With so many teams coming over from the SBC to CUSA this year and next, it will be interesting to see who will keep moving upward and who will fall backwards. I have a real belief that La Tech, UNT, MUTS, and WKU will have a lot of room to move upward. Even though La Tech has fallen back down this year, they will get back up soon, just as USM will, too. I suspect that Rice and Marshall will hold solid as the years go on, but teams like UTEP and UAB don't seem to have much to look forward to, in my opinion. And the newbies, UTSA, ODU, and Charlotte, they are all wildcards to me--I can see any of them becoming great or becoming the dregs of FBS, too. What I want to see is how we compare to the AAC schools going forward--they will continue to lose teams, too. Louisville and Rutgers are out after this season and I suspect that UConn, Cincy, USF, and UCF are gonna be the next pieces to move upward to the ACC or the Big XII in coming years. When their league becomes AACusa, I hope that they will see how stupid it really is to try and and get away from your regional competition for the sake of staying "above" them, as opposed to looking at how much these closer rivalries help non-AQs out from a travel standpoint, as well as a coverage standpoint. I still think that a conference made up of SMU, UNT, Tulsa, Rice, Tulane, La Tech, UTEP, UH, UTSA, Texas State, Arkansas State, and ULL would be the ideal travel conference for the western schools of these three leagues. Let Marshall, Temple, ECU, FAU, FIU, Memphis, UAB, USM, MUTS, WKU, Charlotte, and ODU would be the league for eastern schools. Then you have Troy, ULM, NMSU, and all the other startups that are in the current SBC be the schools you can pluck if anyone leaves to go to the MWC. What absolutely none of these schools in the AAC think about is that their fans could care less about SMU and Temple playing each other or UH playing UAB--they never have and they never will. Those teams are too far away and don't have enough fans to increase your net receipts at the stadium, just like WKU or MUTS bring nothing to Apogee when they play here. One day, this will all get figured out, but I just don't know when or how it will play out. Maybe SMU and UNT playing 8 times in a row will change some of the mindset down in Dallas toward UNT as a potential conference mate down the road. It just makes too much sense for schools at our level of play for football and basketball.

If CUSA expands, it will be a centrally located school that opens up a new tv market. Texas State, nor JMU, do not provide that advantage, since we already have two schools who should have spent their first years in the SBC instead of CUSA in ODU and UTSA. But tv markets drive expansion these days, then name recognition. I'm wiling to bet that UL-Lafayette will be at the top of the next CUSA addition, with Tulane leaving. I suspect that UAB will get forced to drop football down to the fcs level or that a school like FAU might get poached if UCF or USF get pulled away in the future from the AAC. ULL has a decent tv market and can probably open up some connections to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I doubt any MAC team will ever leave their conference to join any Other conference that's not the AAC. Those schools really like their setup for rivalries and easy travel. They aren't gonna see Ball State or northern Illinois leave to join CUSA. NIU will Probably get an AAC invite when UConn or Cincy get Picked away.

Instantly...

I don't know--that game was great, but it looked like there were about 1500 people at that game. With all that Fouts end zone aluminum showing on camera during this game, I felt empathy for MUTS. Even though they have been good, they still looked like they have a long way to go in rallying the locals to come watch them play.

I had Foster Roden as my first finance professor in the fall of 1993. He always opened up class by saying, "OK class, let's open our books to page ___ and lets sing all 8 verses of ____", like we were at church. Of course, he wrote that finance book, so maybe he knew that where "Amazing Grace" or "The Old Rugged Cross" were printed deep in the text!!

The thing with Todd Dodge that made a lot of us, especially me, to believe he was a great hire was because he had great name recognition in the state with HS coaches (which Dickey really burned in the DFW area) and that he was just not going to cost very much (like $275k per year). I figured that we would improve greatly, just because our offense might actually throw the ball more than once a quarter in the first half of games, unlike his predecessor. Dickey had just worn out his welcome with the constant complaining about UNT funding and support, while also just giving the fans absolutely boring football to follow. Plus, I figured that recruiting would pick up because of Dodge's connections and name recognition--and it actually did in Dodge's first couple of full recruiting periods. The problem was that the kids he recruited from the snooty suburban schools in the state never fit in at UNT at all. They played in a dump (Fouts) that was worse than their practice fields at their high schools. To me, that was where we really knew that this thing had nothing to build forward with. You can change coaches to get better, but losing recruits before they even get a chance to develop was a killer to the program's future. What amazed me about Dodge was that he was stubborn enough to have HS assistants in charge of the entire team in his first year. To his credit, he did replace the worst coach I have ever seen at UNT in Ron Mendoza with Gary DeLoach, who had seen great success as a DC at UNT previously. He also hired Mike Canales to run the offense after his third year, so I think he could see that his high school coaching tricks just weren't gonna work here, but again, by the time it was fully realized, it was too late. The worst part of Dodge's tenure that reared its ugly head, though, in my opinion, wasn't the baseless racist complaints in his first year or the rampant drug use by the players that was outed to the public in his second year. It was that after 3 years as a head coach at UNT, and having 2 years left on his contract, Dodge had won 5 games out of 36 games he coached--and was allowed to return for a 4th season, for one reason and one reason only: we wouldn't buyout two years of a $275k contract, that only paying out one extra year as a buyout of $275k was acceptable. To go that cheap was just incredible to me. You told the entire UNT family (alumni, students, faculty, administration, Denton, etc...) that we were only willing to get out of a colossal failure of a hire (winning 13% of your games certain qualifes as EPIC Failure) by paying for one year of a buyout, not two. If you wonder why McCarney has looked like a breath of fresh air here in Denton, a big reason is because of the ineptitude of the previous UNT coaches, but especially his immediate predecessor, Todd Dodge. But if you want to know why it has taken this long to get us back on a path that, at the very least, appears to be a positive one is because the lines on this team were the thinnest and least developed that a FBS team has ever produced, especially defensively. Dodge recruited lots of highly rated skill players, but couldn't get any traction at all with llinemen, which is always the foundation of any team. McCarney's specialty has been in rebuilding programs from the lines up. Slowly, but surely, we have seen solid progress here, which is why we have finally accomplished something amazing here in Denton--winning back-to-back games for the first time in 9 years (sarasm alert on this last part!!). In 2005 and 2006, Darrell Dickey won 5 games total, losing all the momentum that his previous 4 years of winning in the brand new SBC had brought to Denton. Then, Todd Dodge won 6 games in 3.5 years of coaching. McCarney won 6 games by the 2nd game of his 2nd season here. That should tell you all you need to know. All of this is why a few of us cannot believe that RV survived as the AD, much less got an extension earlier this year, in light of spectacular failures in football with Dodge, womens hoops with Shanice Stephens, and in mens hoops with Benford, who appears to be in the same "way-in-over-his-head" look that Dodge had. If Benford fails tremendously, as he did in his first year here, RV will be responsible for hiring the worst three coaches of all-time in the three major revenue sports in the history of the university. It really is amazing...

This... I want them all to lose--the Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas schools, no matter if they are AQ or non-AQ. We get no benefit from having A&M, UT, Tech, Baylor, TCU, OU, OSU, Arkansas, or LSU being ranked as AQs. We are hurt even more when UH, SMU, Tulsa, and Tulane win and use their position on a higher rung of the conference ladder against us in recruiting. It hurts us if La Tech, UTEP, UTSA, or Rice beat us out for bowl spots in CUSA. And it hurts when Texas State, ULL, ULM, and Arkansas State do well because they can convince DFW HS kids to leave the Metroplex and get immediate playing time at their schools when they have signature wins to recruit on. I want them all to lose as much as possible, unless they are playing each other. Then, its CUSA schools first, AQ teams next (since them losing to anyone outside of CUSA is a huge boost to their recruiting), SBC teams, and always the AAC schools. I want SMU and UH to lose every game, go bankrupt from spending all their money on travel to all of the outlying outposts in that conference, and then to drop down to FCS or quit football altogether (ok, maybe this last part might be a bit extreme...)

Rice is no different than SMU, Tulane, and Tulsa. When they win, they reach their maximum of about 25k of their own "fans" that come out to watch a game, while depending on their local big city media to provide free advertisements for them through the coverage they receive. Their students are rich, pampered, very smart (often because of the first part), and they tend to be even more fair-weathered as fans than the students at public universities in similar urban settings. Rice, like the other private schools I listed above, also provides the big AQs something that they love in a non-AQ partner--a game in a bigger city that holds a lot of their alums or traveling fans in their town. Rice gets Texas in Houston, Tulsa gets OU in Tulsa, Tulane gets LSU in NO, and SMU gets A&M and Tech in Dallas. The big AQ teams own those markets, so they can get to see their team play without traveling all the way back to Austin, Norman, Baton Rouge, College Station, or Lubbock. Plus, the AQs fans also know the name of those small private schools, so it adds a tad to the history or rivalry of the game. We never got that chance here in Denton with any of those big AQs. It would have been cool to have had one of those giant AQs show up in Denton, but that's not how the cookie crumbled. I still think that Okie State could play that role here, especially with T Boone being based here. I think it would work out just as well for OSU as it would for us, certainly better than it has for OSU to go play at some SBC spare or UTSA. Just my $.02.

Guys like this are easier to replace than if he was a big lineman or a tall, strong-armed QB. Not saying it will be easy, but I'd venture to guess that given the chance, there are guys on the team now that can step up and play the positions that White was being recruited for. Small and quick is not hard to find--turning them into producers on the field at the college level is a whole other issue.

TCU is definitely feeling the effects of being in an AQ league where most of the teams you play each week are at least as good as you are and play in front of much bigger crowds than they did in the MWC weekin and week-out. BUt TCU has had its last two seasons foiled by Casey Pachall, from drug use and now his broken arm. Trayvon Boykin has regressed badly, since he got thrown to the wolves last year and no one knew what he could do. Now, with a year of film on him, they know he cannot throw the ball worth a damn consistently. Who knows, maybe TCU still sucks offensively if Pachall is their QB, but I bet not. I've seen a lot of their games and I can tell you that they wouldn't have lost all of those games to Tech, OU, and OSU on the road if Pachall is their QB. Maybe they lose two of those three, but their QB issues just doomed them in all 3 games. It would very foolish to think Gary Patterson won't get this turned around with the right QB. They are one of the very few teams in the Big XII that can play defense. If you give that defense an offense that can at least score a few TDs and NOT give up up a lot of turnovers, you'll see a big difference. To me, everyone in that league, excpet for Baylor and Tech, have all digressed big time over the last couple of years. And I'll bet that Tech comes back to the pack to their normal 7-8 wins by the end of the season. Only Baylor has made leaps and bounds since 2010. Speaking of the Big XII, look at what as happened to that league and those who joined in 2012. TCU and WVU have gone waaaayyy down from BCS bowl winners to barely fighting for .500. Texas and OU have had deep falls from playing in national championship games to barely getting ranked. OSU and KSU both had great teams that could have played for a national championship if not a couple of gigantic upsets, but they were senior-laden and are now back to being mediocre to good. Iowa State and Tech continue to be what they always have been, 5-8 win teams that won't win a championship anytime soon. A&M and Mizzou leave to the SEC and become great teams. Nebraska and Colorado continue to be about what they were in the Big XII in those later years, so there's nothing earth-shattering there. Kansas continues to suck, no matter who coaches there. Which leaves Baylor and Art Briles, who have taken advantage of the ineptness of their remaining Big XII brethren to build up quite a nice program in Waco, one that will make those Grant Teaff teams of the 70s and 80s look soft. But, even with that said, the absolute worst thing to happen tot he Big XII is to have little ol' Baylor dominate their conference--it just sends the message across the country that the Big XII is weak, even if Baylor is better than they have ever been.

I'm glad this thread about us having the best record in DFW (finally) turned into a discussion on all the things to do around Waco, West, Gainesville, Muenster, and Lindsay. For anyone who reads this thread and works at a local DFW media establishment, I beg of you to actually talk about the fact that we are getting better and that we have a better record than both SMU and TCU, even if the Frogs have played a much harder schedule.

There are a lot of UT, A&M, Tech, OU, and TCU fans that are just like that fellow you mentioned above. I really know that winning is ultimately the way you fix this--its what TCU did to get back into the good graces of the AQs. Those SWC schools just have so much history and name recognition on their side. Even if the small private schools couldn't compete financially with the resources that the bigger state institutions had, they all had major name recognition. That still carries a lot of weght here. I've met several college football fans who have moved here from the Rust Belt or frm California. They have no idea who North Texas is, but they all know who SMU, TCU, Rice, and Baylor are. When you had the SWC alums control EVERYTHING in this state for all these decades, its tough to get through that. For UNT to make a dent on the DFW talking scene with the media, I'll go back to what one journalist told me several years ago--he was a TCU grad--"UNT needs to win their conference AND beat/compete closely with the bigger AQ names when they get the chance. Then they will garner the attention they have never had in the area." Like it or not, but playing Georgia competitively and getting to a Dallas bowl game where we would get the chance to beat a Big Ten team that people know about might just be our 1998 Sun Bowl moment. It sure as hell wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that way.

I think if he we finish out with 3 or more regular season wins, which means we will be all but assuredly be playing a Big Ten team in a bowl game in Dallas, Coach Mac will get a 2 year extension before the bowl game, which would be more than earned and deserved. A 6-6 season is the real question--would we even get a bowl bid? If we do, and lose that bowl game, we will have had yet another losing season, even with all the improvement that Mac has brought along, so that is the real 50/50 breakpoint to me. If we do somethingcrazy like finish out 8-4 and win our bowl game, it wouldn't surprise me to see an AQ in the Midwest come calling with a big 4-5 year contract offer. Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan State, Purdue, or Minnesota could look at McCarney's job here and combine it with his rebuild in Iowa State and they could say that his energy and positivev attitude are just what we need to turn this around in time for him to hand pick a successor if things go right. If we beat USM, UTSA, and UTEP, but lose to Rice and Tulsa, that gets us to 7-5. I think it get Mac an extra two years. If he wins another game before the season ends, I think he'll get 3 extra years. But at 6-6, its not out of the question to see where things go in Year 4 to make the decision, as well. To me, I've seen enough of McCarney to know that 6-6 at this place, no matter the schedule, is worth an extra two years, just because of his energy and his positive attributes. But that just my opinion...

Said no one ever...

Until we win on the road, I cant predict us to win... La Tech wins a close one--23-20

I love college basketball even more than college football, but the reality is that absolutely no one in this state cares about college basketball unless they are going to be in the tournament from the Big XII. UNTs debacle last season in basketball was awful, for sure, but no one in the media reports on college basketball that much because very few care about the sport the way I do and a few others on this site do.

This was a great topic I just stumbled upon. I think the i-aa fiasco will eventually wear off around here--as the gradautes of UNT from the 2000s and beyond will have only known UNT as a FBS program, albeit a non-AQ. But there are more people connected to UNT Football from the SBC Championship years in 2001-2004 than probably all of the almus from 1985-1995 put together. Reading Gosselin's article from his trip to Apogee reminded me of just how low this place was for athletics when RV took over. To have to see an AD face a reallity of less than 200 people at a 1-A game before he took over while also looking at the total of $1.5 million dollars spent on athletics since 1979 is just ludicrous. All of this going on at a school in freaking Texas, of all places, where football is king. As with many things, its always good to remember your past mistakes, so that you can try to avoid committing them again. I just fear that one day the AQs are going to split away from the rest of us and we are going to be left high and dry again, but this time it will be due to the greed of the AQs, not to our own incompetence. In the end, you control what you can control, though. If we are going to be a FBS program, we have to fund it, we have to promote it, we have to help it through attendance and leadership, as well as donations. North Texas has never been given anything--we have had to fight and hope for a scrap here or there. What this school could have looked like if we ever got admitted to the SWC in the 70s is almost haunting. Heck, even getting into CUSA back when there were openings, only to see us get blackballed again, makes me wonder where we would be today as a program, whether we were still in CUSA or in another conference. But it goes back to controlling what we can control--and with the recent funding of facilities, salaries, and budgets, UNT looks like we may have finally gotten what athletics--primarily football--can do for your university. We still have lots of work to do, but I'm hopeful to see this train keep on moving on down the tracks and not get derailed ever again by those folks in Denton who hate UNT athletics and the costs associated with it.

I think he was implying that it was a better day when the marching bands each got TV time at halftime, but the legal issues of the day have cost us that coverage. I don't believe he was blaming band direcotrs or composers, but if he is, who cares... I watch a game on Saturday, whether its in person or on TV, for the football. Yes, its cool to hear the fight songs and the pomp and circumstance in the background, but the music will never ever be a reason for me to attend a game. If they cut out the marching during halftime and just let the bands perform songs from their seats, that's be just fine with me. Again, the band is secondary to the game, just as the cheerleaders and the PA are secondary. If we don't get to watch halftime marching shows anymore on TV, then that's fine with most fans, because we want to see highlights and scores from other games anyway. Sorry if that hurts anyone's feelings, but the public consumes football with a great fervor, not marching band competitions. That cannot be argued...as a matter of fact, bands owe an immense amount of gratitude towards the sport of football. Football gives them an event to perfrom at, while often producing the revenues for high schools and colleges to even have a band.

This is McCarney's MO--hire the right defensive coach to coach up the low rated kids that can be developed into a stronger unit on the line. Same goes for the Oline, also. I think McCarney winning this last game to get to 3 wins assures him next season, even we lost the rest of our games, which won't happen. The next steps for development of this program is to learn to win on the road. The next two places are certainly winnable games, for sure, even if they sound like tough games at La Tech and at USM because of their reputations. We need to win of these for sure. If we are 4-4 after these next two games, we get the Texas triplets fo ther next 3 at home. Win 2 of those 3 and you are 6-5 heading into Tulsa, which looks more winnable than any of those thought possible at the beginning of the year. 6 wins or better will get McCarney an extension, for sure. Right now, this team plays so Jekyll at home and Hyde on the road, though, its just hard to predict anything better than 3-3 the rest of the way.

We were where they are back in 2007...I would hope we never go back to losing at Rice 77-20 or at home to Tulsa 54-2.

Two years ago, that team won 2 games and we beat them by 59-7 in Denton. I'm sorry, but we have been like that for too many years between 2005-2010. I'd just as soon aim a bit higher than establishing ourselves as the next MUTS...maybe this is this best we can hope for, but I'd like to think we could find a few other programs to emulate that have a ton more respect than MUTS.

It is actually possible that this line of thinking in the AD and with the BOR is exactly what they are all acting on. Its not great, but its not terrible, either. It just depends on how badly you need the cash by playing road games. In the past, its been pretty obvious that these road games have served as the major arm of cash flow to cover UNT Athletics. A lot of us thought that Apogee would change this, but it is very possible that it hasn't changed a bit. In no way am I advocating this stance to be acceptable or correct, I just think its very possible that it is the way we will continue to view football scheduling for years to come. History certainly backs this sentiment up.

If you think this is decent smack talk, I think I know why you decided to get a degree from the sparest of directionally-named schools in the country. Seriously, your school's name is a complete joke. Being Central Tennessee State would be bad enough, but instead, your school went with the term "Middle". That's a great way to really be taken seriously outside of Nashville. If you think that me complaining that my school has been losing for the last 8 years to mostly the dregs of FBS football, including you guys and the other SBCUSA spares, should cease because we have had trouble beating teams like you, then I am not sure what to say. Fans in Texas like to talk about the Big XII and SEC, or at least when Texas teams play each other. When TCU and SMU play each other, it resonates here in DFW. When UH and Rice play, it resonates in Houston. When Baylor and Tech play, it resonates throughout the state. When I shoehorn in that my alma mater, UNT, is playing Middle Tennessee, at best I get indifference, while usually getting laughs at how spare of a game it must be to watch North Texas play Middle Tennessee, especially while Texas is playing OU down the road, or A&M is playing Arkansas. Maybe in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, maybe going to watch a Middle Tennessee State game against North Texas resonates with the "locals". If so, good for you all. My point is simply, that in Denton, Texas, basically the top part of the DFW Metroplex, a North Texas game against Middle Tennessee doesn't move the needle because we have a lot of other sporting options to consider. Its my opinion, that even if we were winning big instead of always losing, a game against Middle Tennessee in Denton will never see a big crowd--because you don't bring anyone here and no one in this area cares about watching y'all play against us. I could care less if the exact situation is the same when we go to your town for a game. I'm not in the least concerned about your program's well-being. Even if you guys are way better than Memphis in football right now, us playing Memphis in Denton would at least get more people to consider coming to a game in Denton than when you all visit us. Again, that's what I'm trying to convey here, that the opponent is what drives attendance at most non-AQs. In the end, that's why having you guys and Western Kentucky in CUSA is better than taking on more FCS move-ups, but it still doesn't help with our biggest issue--having stronger attendance to help increase revenues, the fanbase, and media coverage. Never has a home game against Middle Tennessee even registered a blip on the radar to the citizens or the media members in the DFW Metroplex. Sorry if that offends you, but that's our issue, not necessarily yours.

The entire home schedules under Coach Mac have been Houston, Indiana, ULM, FAU, WKU, and MUTS in 2011. Texas Southern, Troy, ULL, Ark State, and South Alabama, in 2012. In 2013, so far, its been Idaho and Ball State, with MUTS, Rice, UTEP, and UTSA to follow.

So what kind of attendance are we expecting for this game? With the myriad of easy excuses at hand, I predict 13k as the announced crowd.