untjim1995

This guy is the perfect example of what is produced by the anti-athletics mindset of UNT. He bitches all the time, tries to amke us feel stupid for even putting one cent toward athletics that we are surely going to fail at, and then he bloviates about how great SMU, UTSA, UH, etc...all are versus little ol' North Texas. He's a real tool, one that is perfect for the ignore feature of this site...

Our OOC scheduling has dramatically improved under RV, compared to Helwig's OOC schedules. We play 1 no-win bodybag game a year now, with an additional money game thrown in here or there during some OOC. The OOC schedules have looked much more like this year's--one bodybag game at UGA, two MAC schools, and a very winnable opponent in Idaho. When Helwig was our AD, our OOC would look like this: open at Oklahoma, play at Arkansas, home against UNLV, at TCU. You get the idea--we played two no win games with big payout, a team in TCU that only played us in a series because they needed wins, and then a return game of a series. The thing about RV that disappoints is that the home OOC is just mediocre to just awful almost every year. The first year at Apogee is what I expected as a typical home slate in OOC every year. Its your way of rewarding the season ticket holder--give them a team that they get to see play in our new stadium. Instead, RV gave them Texas Southern last year, will give them Idaho and Ball State this year, and probably will give us SMU only in 2014. SMU and Army probably won't get matched up with anything more than a bought FCS or SBC game for the next 8 years, either. And if we still played at Fouts, I'd totally understand it. That toilet of a stadium was doing good to host spares, much less anyone that would bring out a big crowd. But we were told that Apogee would bring in more well-known teams as OOC opponents, which was also a selling point for spending $78 million dollars. Every single home OOC opponent we have scheduled all could have been hosted at Fouts. Again, we needed Apogee just to insure that we would have a football team since Fouts couldn't handle a gameday without the help of multiple generators to add energy capacity. But I suspect that our in-town, athletic-hating, Denia-living residents who continuously pound on the university for spending money on a team and a department that they despise with all their hearts will add this as Reason #1000 as to why spending these funds was wasteful and that the university's leaders must be held responsible for letting this happen. If you don't believe me, just pick a day and open up your NT Daily or DRC and read what your typical student or resident thinks about UNT Football and its costs--its amazingly short-sighted, but its very prevalent because of the anti-athletics stance that has been taken by UNT for so long. And maybe beating someone with a well-known reputation at home wouldn't change any of this thought--maybe beating a team like Missouri or Nebraska wouldn't even register much on the radar in Denton if we played and beat them at home--but I do know that it would have to bring more people to a game at Apogee (And thus to Denton) to spend money than hosting and winning a game over SMU or Army will do.

For some reason, I thought I saw that UNT broke even on the money sports, versus their expenses. Now, I could be very wrong about that, but the reality is that the money sports are where the most fans are and the most attention can be gained for the entire university. No minor sport, nor any other university sponsored endeavor brings in the attention or money that a well run football and basketball program can do.

I was in San Antonio this past weekend, and I was reminded yet again of all the advantages UTSA will have in their favor as the years go by. Thatv town loves their SPurs and want desperately to have someone else to root for as their own. I realize that they have UT just up the road and their are a ton of Aggies there, too, but they are lots of potential fans for UTSA to get just because they will have that entire city as their own. In that way, alone, they are like UTEP to me. Maybe they will fall on their face for the next 30 years, but I suspect that they will get this thing going soon. But with all that said, this year will be a painful reminder of just how far they have to go in the FBS world. Their schedule is brutal for their current roster. It will look a lot like our 1995 schedule. That is why I will find a loss to them as the ultimate give up. That is my line in the sand, unless UTSA is somehow really good, which I highly doubt they will be in 2013. Now, 2014 and beyond is a completely different deal. I expect them to battle the CUSA teams very hard in the future. The advantages they have over us are staggering in my point view--no market to share with other peers at FBS right now, media spotlight in both TV and print, potentially large fanbase in their city, and OOC scheduled games at home--they could really zoom forward if they do this right. Plus, they have never disappointed their own fanbse and the local media by dropping football down for a generation of fans, so they aren't still trying to win these people back 20+ years later like we are. I think that Texas State and North Texas are going to be the apples to apples to compare over the next decade--since we are both on the outskirts of the main cities and we aren't going to get much help from our in-state brethren when it comes to anything.

The Directors Cup is fine, I suppose, but I want there to be a Cup for Sports that Pay Bills. IOW, football, mens basketball, and womens' basketball. Add baseball, if you want to. But I personally could care less about the olympic sports. Again, that's not to say they aren't important to those who watch them or participate in them, but they bring no money to the athletic department. In the Untjim Cup, the Mean Green are in dead last place in Texas among FBS universities. Dead. Ass. Last. And we don't even care about that--it causes not even a smidge of embarrassment for 90+% of the university's "family". We kicked ass, though, in music and arts, so we have that scoreboard, along with still being a "great value"!! Its why I don't really get why baseball is so high on the prioroty list for many posters here. I love baseball and I watch college baseball from time to time. But there is not one ounce of my brain that expects us to support it well at all, so why lay out the extra funds that could be used toward the sports that could make money for you if you win at them? There is a real reason why so many schools don't have a baseball team--it costs more than what it brings in. I just don't see it working out well here at all.

To me the maker for this season is beating one of those MAC Schools in OOC. Both are just as good as anything that CUSA will throw out there. The breaker of the season is losing to Idaho or Tulane, because you literally won't win more than 2 games at most. The overall maker for me is winning 8+ games and going to a bowl game. The breaker of all time for me as a fan is losing to UTSA--that line cannot be crossed...

Your point about DD's coaching against the UTs of the world is spot-on. We always ran the ball alot anyway, but when we played anyone outside of the SBC, our gampelan was to just run out the clock as soon as possible, so as to avoid injuries and collect the check. In some ways, that attitude probably helped Dickey because the players were healthier for the SBC games that he made his way with as our head coach. But that was so short sighted--seriously, a 27-0 loss at a top five UT and a 37-3 loss at #1 OU in back-to-back seasons are looked back on in much higher regard than beating any SBC team of the time. As a matter of fact, only the wins over Cincinnati and Baylor really resonate today with fans, although the the two NMSU games that provided a miracle win and a conference championship game at Fouts also are mentioned often. No other games stand out from that time because we beat teams no one cared about in an incredibly boring fashion. That team's defense was stout and our running game was strong. We really never asked too much of the QB, other than just to make sure they handed the ball off or could make a play action pass. It was fun because we won, but it was really only meaningful to those of us who went to the games. We averaged around 15k at Fouts during those years, and we got a few headlines for our running game, but when we looked out to the rest of the college football world, we were met with a huge "meh" from the media and other fans. The one time we played a bigger named OOC opponent at Fouts and won, it probably gave us more Texas exposure than I ever remember (2003 over Baylor). Other than that, we hosted Nicholls State as our one OOC home game in 2002, Florida Atlantic was considered OOC in 2004 (we lost) at home, and then we got prison raped by Tulsa at home in 2005, which started the downslide that we cannot seem to get out of today. That was why those years were both enjoyable and frustrating at the same time. But they sure beat the hell out of what we've endured since 2005.

I agree with his assessment, record-wise. Seriously, how weak is your schedule, though, if you can go 5-7 and still be considered the 115th best program in the country? CUSA was supposed to be a stepup in competition, but this schedule isn't really any stronger than the old SBC schedule we usually played, especially since our OOC schedules most of those years was dramatically tougher than this years.

Coach Mac is safe for this year, unless we win less than 3 games. If you figure Idaho and UTSA are wins on the 2013 schedule, he already has 2/3rds of it taken care of. Only getting 1-2 more wins the rest of the way in 2012 would be terribly disappointing to me, but it won't cost McCarney his job. His make-it-or-break-it year will be 2014. His buyout is only one year and it won't make recruiting massively harder for this place than it already is with a coach who is in the last year of a contract. As if the other coaches we go up against aren't already full of plenty of information to recruit against us with, having Coach Mac go into a 5th year with absolutely no guarantee of an extension would kill recruiting. We can't beat out the ULMs of the world right now, but if Mac was coaching his 5th year (2015) without an extension, we wouldn't beat out SFA or Sam Houston for recruits. As for RV, I'm convinced he has a job for life. He will get to dictate when he leaves. He does the work the BOR and administration want from him, plus the fans love him for opening up tailgating and for getting major facilities built on his watch. The university just looks at athletics as something to offer for fans who want to see their university particpate. Winning simply doesn't matter, at all. When your winning percentage is well below 40% as a program since 1970, its pretty hard to argue this point. When it is basically the same winning percentage since we moved back up to FBS play in 1995, it becomes even more clear. We either don't have the money or don't want to use the funds to pay to win in athletics. If it is because we don't have the money, we shouldn't play at this level of college football. We really should have stayed as a FCS program. But, if its because we just won't pay to win in athletics, then I have to question why we even want to play sports at all. We wouldn't do that to our music department, let it go deprived of needed instruments, halls, instructors, and advertising. We shouldn't do that for athletics, either, unless we actually provide legitimate clear proof that we absolutely cannot afford to pay for success in sports. By the way, charging only half of the athletics fee that can be charged while others (UTSA, Texas State) charge the full price will not be legitimate proof, either, that we cannot fund the program adequately.

Oh, I completely agree with you about Southern Miss. I just think we will one of the road games at La Tech or USM, even if its by the narrowest of margins. I see the USM game as more winnable than the home game against Ball State, though.

Dear GL2Greatness, TL;DR Sincerely, Everyone

I think that this is all a moot point. We aren't going to ever be in the MWC. They don't want us, our fans don't want them, our administrations doesn't want them, and our university cannot afford it because we don't want to pay more for anything assocaited with football than we already have. We want to be in a regional conference because it costs less. There's not much else you can say about it. And, to their credit, CUSA West is a huge upgrade from anything we have ever known as a university within a conference in the last 40 years. Much like with Apogee, the job is done now that we are in CUSA, in the view of the university's leaders that actually know what a football looks like and don't hate the sport. We moved up from Fouts and out of the SBC--their job is done. That's just how it goes here. We don't want to allocate more resources than we have to toward athletics. It was hard enough to convince them to issue a fee that is half of whwat UTSA and Texas State are charging just to go toward athletics so that Apogee could be built. There will be great joy in the administration building when the fee is retired and we don't have to pay for Apogee anymore, thus lowering tuition costs. That should get us moved up even higher in the "Greatest Education Value in America" list. Its just different here.

Texas State will follow a very similar trail in the SBC that we did. The SBC teams are still improving each year and Texas State's fans won't care one bit about playing any of them. ULM, ULL, Arky State, and Troy are all waaayyyy ahead of them right now. They will still get some in-state games on the road against the Big 12 teams, but I doubt they will see any CUSA school in this state on their schedule anytime soon. UTSA will look down their noses at TSU-SM if they get their program off to a good start. It will be very SMU-UNT, La Tech-ULM, esque. I think Franchione is a very good coach and I believe he will do fine at Texas State, but I don't see any Texas schools offering them any help by shceduling them, especially in San Marcos. Welcome to our previous world, Bobcats...you'll find that it is not easy to get fans excited about playing SBC teams, especially those in the Eastern parts of their conference.

I see it like this. Wins= Idaho, @Tulane, @ Southern Miss, UTEP, and UTSA. 5-7 with a slightly improved outlook. Coach Mac enters his 4th year on a warm seat, but he has Berglund ready to go after it in 2014 to get us to 7 wins and a bowl berth, which leads to an extension for Coach Mac. If we really exceeded realistic expectations, we would win 8 games (add in 3 wins over Ball State, MUTS, La Tech, and Rice). If we fall off the wagon, we still beat Idaho and UTSA.

This. MWC is better than every conference, not in the AQ, and in some years, it has been better than the ACC. I'm not sure that it won't be better than the Big XII this year. The MWC's bottom teams are terrible, but their top teams are usually very good. I still believe that BYU will make their way back into that league in the next few years and that they will add teams in Texas, probably upwards of three teams. I suspect that UTEP, especially if they can get UH and SMU to go with them, will be your next move in the conference realignment game. That AAC is just a trainwreck waiting to happen and 16 team conferences will soon become the norm. IF SMU wants to stay with their private friends and Eastern schools in the AAC, then the MWC will have to look hard at either UNT or UTSA. My guess is that by then, UTSA will either be the clear choice to invite or to ignore. We deserve to be where we are in the FBS pecking order. The MWC would have gladly taken us if we had done anything since Dickey's run ended in 2004, especiallya s a our hoops team was getting stronger. Now, we offer them nothing at all. And, frankly, if SMU hadn't moved to the AAC, we would be stuck in the SBC still, so I suppose it could've been worse. But we have no one to blame but ourselves now--the university's cultural view of football has been too tough to defeat; its what the "family" has wanted.

I've never met you, but you seem like one heckuva guy and UNT fan. I've been a fan since 1990 and I can tell you that it has been nothing but heartache and a beating, except for 1994 and those 3.5 years you mentioned under Dickey. I never cared much for either Simon or Dickey as people, but they had their own small successes here and they should be treasured, just as you all remember fondly the Corky Nelson years of beating major programs while operating on a shoestring budget. Our return has been disastrous because we weren't really ready to make the jump to 1-A, IMO, in 1995. Sure, we pieced together Fouts with donated alumnum seats to get just over 30K, but the administration didn't care to put anything into the program. I'd love to believe that we should have done what we did earlier than 1995, but the reality is that the 1-aa purgatory was self-inflicted and was encouraged by the administration, BOR, and the community, so as much as I hate to say this, I think our best time to have moved upward to FBS was probably when we got Norval Pohl here as President, which was in 2000 IIRC. He wanted football to be something at UNT, which put him in a very small group of leaders in our history. I believe that he would have found a way to have gotten a new stadium built earlier than it did, if it had been with a promise to move up to FBS ball. Matt Simon might have actually been a better head coach if he had time to continue building his program in the old SLC for more than one year.Maybe Darrell Dickey would have been hired to take over a program that was more ready for FBS ball than what he got, with attendance at home games in the years 1998-2000 as abysmal as you could get (See NMSU game in 2000 at Fouts). Maybe DIckey doesn't get the anti-UNT stance in his brain that so irked the few diehard fans still around. We haven't been very good at football, both on the field or off, since Hayden Fry left. That's why I am jealous of the guys who have the stories to tell about them. I encourage you to always tell us about the wins over Tennesse, San Diego State, Houston, SMU, OSU, and all the others in that time. That is the only time North Texas even became a blip on the college football radar. Even Dickey's years were shrugged off as nothing by everyone in college football because of the SBC being looked at so negatively--which is why a guy who basically performed a miracle in Denton never got that head coaching offer he thought was coming from anywhere else in I-A at the time. Our timing has never been good, nor has our funding--both are leadership failures from all responsible parties, but it hits on the fact that the university hasn't ever put any priority on athletic success. Whether its short term (since 2007), intermediate term (1995-2006), or long term (since 1979), we showed the entire college football world that we just didn't give a crap about football success. And unless things turn around big time in the next 5 years, I suspect that we will get back to the equivalent of FCS ball again. And the question will be asked over and over if Apogee was worth the cost to build for a program that was never close to being an AQ school. To me, it should have been built 20 years earlier, but the naysayers of Denton that hate football are going to go crazy screaming about the $78 million dollars spent to build that stadium and the tuition hikes even louder than now if we go back to being a FCS team again.

There is no doubt that JerryWorld and TCU being in the Big XII now absolutely hurt our chances of scheduling other Big XII schools here or the local SEC schools (LSU, A&M, or Arkansas, but they probably weren't gonna play here anyway). The thing, though, about our location is that it would still give teams like Mizzou, Nebraska, and Colorado a chance to get back here for a presence in Texas again. And, I'd be willing to bet that OSU, KU, KSU, and Iowa State wouldn't mind an extra visit to the Metroplex on their schedules when they aren't playing in Ft. Worth. But unless something changes, and I doubt it will from the big money schools buying us off for a win, we cannot add another one-and-one series for a long time. So its either get SFA, SHSU, or some Sun Belt school to come here for a bought game in Denton, or we go take another payday at another AQ's place for an almost sure loss. I have always maintained that playing one bodybag game a year is very acceptable--just stop playing southern schools, especially in the SEC or Big XII. Iowa is fine as a $$$ game opponent because at least you have a chance at competing with them for 4 quarters. I'm not sure that a team like Iowa shouldn't also come here in a series, but that is a null point now. So playing Iowa as your bodybag game is fine, but it is beyond ridiculous to allow yourself to play at Iowa and at Tennessee in the same season. Last year, we played at LSU and K-State, but that K-State game was part of the 2 for 1 with them, so it made some sense that we got caught in that situation. Not a lot, but some. But we shouldn't have had that happen again. So SMU and Army in OOC at Apogee in alternate years is the best we can do. It may be the one game that gets a big crowd and gets some media attention in Denton in those years, but at least we have them. I don't know any other way to look at it all at this point. At least we have one OOC home game over the next 8 years and it will be against someone that most fans have heard of. It may be the only home OOC game of those years or it may be in conjunction with another home game against Texas Southern or Lamar, but that is how the cookie crumbles up in Denton in the ADs office.

Benford's only strength as a coach, so far, appears to be in recruiting. Just hope it all works out better than the last coach (Trilli) we had that could say the same thing. Otherwise, we are about to see more sever ass whippings in the years to follow.

UNT90 may be pulling out his hair, but he is right on all of this. I'm sorry, but Apogee has brought or is bringing us OOC games against UH, Indiana, Texas Southern, Idaho, Ball State, SMU, Army, and possibly Tulsa. We played all of those teams, except Indiana and Ball State at Fouts. And for comparative sake, we played Baylor and Vandy at Fouts to make up for Indiana, and we played Ohio at Fouts to make up for Ball State. When the dust settles in CUSA, we will host games against UTEP, UTSA, Rice, La Tech, MUTS, WKU, UAB, Southern Miss, FAU, FIU, Charlotte, Marshall, and ODU over the upcoming years to Apogee. There is no doubt that it is a better schedule than we had in the SBC. But it still isn't going to get people out to watch North Texas play if we are still mediocre or bad. Games against Navy and Army at Fouts were nice because they drew big crowds from the buying public and that was about as big as Fouts could handle in its decrepit state. Now, with a state of the art facility in the DFW Metroplex, the best we can do is SMU and Army in alternative years as the main OOC gem? There's just no way that Apogee couldn't hold and be marketable to a PAC school, a lower level SEC school, or other schools in the B1G, ACC or the MWC. I'm sorry, but we make it for SMU and TCU when it comes to local competition for the fans attention. The local media doesn't give a rat's ass about North Texas because we don't ever play anyone that they care about, which in turns gives the majority of fans a reason to keep ignoring us. SMU has been playing their old SWC rivals at home with a game against a local FCS school for balance. TCU has done the same in OOC scheduling for so long, too. But, as usual, we just settle for leftover status--"We weren't in the SWC, so we will never matter..." or "We are a school that doesn't like football--go to UT or A&M if you like sports" are the typical trash that we hear from the anti-athletics crowd or the anti-UNT media in the area. Just once, in my lifetime, I want to see UNT fight--you know, like in our fight sone, "UNT EAGLES FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT"--just to try as hard as possible to see if we can do what others have done before us and are doing today even though they have been around a tenth of the time we have. You don't have to get Texas or A&M here--but go after a long series with UH or Baylor or TCU or Tech or OSU, someone to compliment the series we have with SMU and Army already. You can still play your bodybag game and play something like that. Give something more to your season tickets holders than spare OOC games and SBCUSA teams.

I'd really hate to hear what she wants to do to you to keep you from attending games in Austin, Norman, Baton Rouge, etc...

That is the truth. The reality is that buidling Apogee was a must because Fouts was falling apart and couldn't even handle a 15k crowd very well, with all of the portable generators that had to be used. That's not even including the awful seating and terrible concourses. But one thing we heard over and over was that Apogee would help us get more recognizable opponents in OOC games to Denton than Fouts could ever get us. And in its first year, the games against UH and Indiana were a perfect example of what to expect from this. Then the next year produces one OOC home game against Texas Southern. Now, in 2013, Apogee gets us home games against Idaho and Ball State. I thought an opponent like Iowa would make complete sense to play here, at least as a 2 for 1, not a 2 for none. And, now, we find out that we will again have 5 home games in 2015, unless we buy a game against a FCS team or Idaho-type team again. I just expected that this would enhance the OOC home schedule for the season ticket holders, but it appears that I was mistaken in that belief. SMU and Army are fine OOC home opponents--very good draws, for sure. I just think its sad that they are considered as big name oppoenents for this AD. If you had Iowa and SMU playing here in the OOC portion of the schedule, that would be a great value to a season ticket holder. Same with playing a team like Mizzou at home in addition to Army. But that's not how it is done here, so it really is just crying over spilled milk.

Exactly. For this gal, she thinks that an AQ BCS bowl bid opportunity for the AAC for this year only, means forever. Its rough when reality runs into your dreams. All said, UH will be fine in the AAC. They'll probably win that league many times. But it will get them the same spare bowl spot that all other non-AQ champions get. If you think that the MWC isn't going to fill that spot most years (or the MAC), then you are dreaming even more than I thought.

Isn't that how you change a hockey line?...oh wait, wrong sport.

How is the football team's GPA? I haven't looked at any breakdown, but I know that was a big concern of Coach Mac when he first got here.

1999--we beat Texas Tech and Boise State. And lost to everyone else...go figure.