untjim1995

Imagine what a school primarily geared toward educating future teachers would be like in atheltics if they were located in Texas...oh wait!!

The folks in Denton and at UNT are just fine with this...

What else?

I think we look like we belong back in the SLC to these people for a lot of reasons. Losing big time to SMU won't add anymore fuel to that fire. Losing games to outlets called Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee, Florida International, and Louisiana-Monroe have done more damage on that front. Playing teams at home in Denton like Texas Southern and South Alabama make this SLC perception even more accepted. I'll say this--if we lose to UTSA this year, that will do it for me. I'll let everyone know that the SLC really should be our home if we cannot beat a startup program in its third year of existence.

So Texas State and UTSA are playing FBS football for all of what, two years now, but have in place a $20 maximum semester hour charge to tuition for athletics. North Texas, who has been playing FBS ball again sionce 1995, had to basically go "stealth" on the election to narrowly get approval for a fee that is half ($10) of Texas Freaking State and UTSA just to build a new stadium, which Texas State is just expanding on theirs, not building up from scratch, while UTSA doesn't even have to build anything right now due to playing in the Alamodome. HOwever, I do see that in 2013, we do charge $15/hr for the "Universites Center at Dallas" I just don't get it...if we don't want to play FBS football around here, its ok. Just tell us that directly. Don't implicitly sabotage the program by not giving it a full effort. How can you compete with schools in your own conference or at your same level but only charge half of what they do, even though their enrollment is not terribly far from ours? Please explain this to me...

Welcome to the unfortunate state of UNT Football in this state. If you weren't SWC--or the Oklahoma schools int he old Big Eight, around here, to students, alumni, and the local residents of Denton, we literally don't matter. I guarantee you that Texas, A&M, OU, and Tech have more interest in their games from Dentonites than we do. I like CUSA, even if has turned into SBC 2.0, but it is an improvement and we are in better shape playing La Tech than ULM, playing UAB than South Alabama, and playing Southern Miss than Troy as conference mates. Is it a ton better? Not really. But it is better. And it would be even better with Arky State and ULL, coming into replace Tulane and Tulsa here in the western part of the league.

OK--we played SMU in 2006 and 2007. In 2006, we killed them at Fouts. The local media didn't write about us being as a complete success because we beat SMU at home. In fact, that win cost SMU a bowl game, even though we only won three games that year. In 2007, we lost to SMU in Dallas by a TD, IIRC. We weren't written off as a complete failure after that loss to SMU, even though both teams should have been. That was SMUs only win of the year and we won two games. We will always treat this as a big game. You don't need to worry about that part. The only buyout that would occur here is if June Jones leaves SMU and they go back to losing, while we beat them in the first two games and are winning. That would cause the SMU cash to come to the rescue. However, if we lose to SMU in 2014, nobody is going to write us off then as a complete failure. They'll write that SMU got a nice Metroplex rivalry win. Maybe Vito will write a story that we are a complete failure, but not one word will be spoken about us being failure on even one sports outlet in DFW. That's part of the problem, no one even cares about us to talk about our lackluster performance. Even when we were winning the SBC titles, we almost always getting ho-hummed in the local media because we were basically only beating SBC teams.

NO problem--I just wanted to weigh in as to why SMU still gets more attention than they truly deserve...

I remember LaDarrin McLane for one thing only--the most depressing moment of my UNT fandom was watching him streak toward the winning TD in Lubbock only to see him caught from behind and fumble away the ball that cost us a victory over Tech. That would have been the fourth win in a row over Tech in Lubbock (1988, 1997, 1999). Never have I been more disappointed as a UNT football fan than at that very moment. I've been embarrassed too often to remember (Getting murdered by freaking Rice 77-20 was also a low point for shame), but nothing hurt like that donkey punch to the groin when he got caught and fumbled away the victory.

Well, they haven't gotten in the habit of coming up to Denton in the last 8 decades, so I suppose it might worth a try to bring a scrimmage or a practice in the springtime closer to some of our alumni and their friends and family. Or we can just keep doing things the way we have for those 8 decades...

He probably got a nice thank you letter from the coaches at Troy, too. See, you can play this any way you want.

The problem with this last sentence is that it really seems as if that athletics spending and support is counter-intuitive to a school that places a great value on being a "value" and heavily supports fine arts and education. I just don't know that you will ever convince the majority of UNT's core (BOR, administration, faculty, students, alumni, local citizenry, etc..) to fund the athletic department in a fashion that befits a university of our size because its not what the clear majority wants or finds acceptable. If the additional funding was to increase spending on the Green Brigade or on the Fine Arts College buildings and faculty, that spending would get ok'd in a heart beat by all involved. But sports is a differnet animal--at most schools in Texas, its used as a window to the university and it provides the university an opportunity to gets its core together. Here, it is the exact opposite. I just don't know if that is ever going to change.

I like this--do a practice over at Frisco in the soccer stadium. Go down to Southlake and have a scrimmage at Dragon Stadium. You go where your alumni are and get some future students to see the university reaching out to you. Heck, I wouldn't mind seeing them schedule a spring scrimmage/practice in Sherman or Wichita Falls, either. We are North Texas and both of those cities are decent sized communities that are in our footprint, too.

Don't forget about the epic battle for Lamar that should get rolling very soon, too. They will be a terrific add to the SBC, in my opinion. I'm serious. The biggest thing that sucks about CUSA and the SBC adding these FCS startups is that having 124+ schools that are defined as FBS will just shorten the time until that future culling occurs within the FBS standard. It was hard enough for the AQs to accept the SBC teams as being considered FBS, even though the deck is way stacked against them. They still don't like that the number of Division 1 teams has gotten that high and will only get higher in the coming years. Just like they did in the early 80s, they will get the NCAA to reduce that number to a more "appropriate" number. HIstory may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes...that future culling will look a lot like the old 1-aa.

Both of them would be fine additions. Neither of them are going to make cusa worse than it already is with the AAC defections. Seriously, if you could've said that we would leave ULM, South Alabama, and Troy behind, but would be in a conference with the current SBC Teams (including ASU and ULL) in CUSA and would add La Tech, Rice, UTEP, UAB, Southern Miss, and Marshall to the mix, most of us would've been onboard with this. That list would be WKU, MUTS, FAU, FIU, Ark State, ULL, La Tech, Southern Miss, UAB, Marshall, Rice, UTEP, UNT, and UTSA would make a nice 14 team league that is a hybrid of old WAC, SBC, and CUSA teams into a better league for UNT, at least. I suspect that having them both with Charlotte and ODU would make for a decent league, even though I think Banowsky added Charlotte and ODU way too soon, as he thought he was buying off ECU to stay. He basically got played. To me, that was worse than watching Tulane or Tulsa leave after the other defections to the AAC had been announced. Losing those two programs was bad, but adding two teams that aren't even FBS programs yet just to placate a university (ECU) that had made it clear that they would take a nano-second to leave CUSA to go to the Big East is as poor a move as I can ever remember a confernece commissioner making. No one here in Texas was clamoring for UTSA to be added--but their situation made sense to take advantage of as a conference member. Maybe Charlotte and ODU will be that way, too, but they were simply added to placate ECU and its place as the big dog in the new CUSA to get closer travel mates in the conference. If you had just that 14 team league I listed earlier (including UTSA), that would be pretty stout. Charlotte and ODU would be nice adds for the new SBC, especially with Ga Southern and Appy State being added to the league. But we are stuck with them now. ULL makes for a nice replacement for Tulane and Arky State makes for a nice replacement to Tulsa, in my opinion. Bigger schools that have better attendance and support than those two small private schools, even if they are in bigger markets. I will say this, though. If you are still in CUSA, at this point, its because you couldn't find any other place to land. A 16 team league with more geographic rivals would be a smart plan. We all wanted CUSA with SMU, Houston, Rice, UTEP, Tulsa, Tulane, Memphis, UCF, UAB, USM, Marshall, and ECU. But they didn't want us. Once SMU left, then we had our chance to get into the league. But SMU, UH, UCF, Memphis, and, eventually, ECU, Tulane, and Tulsa wanted to remain together. If UConn and Cincy do leave soon, and I think they will within the next year or two, I think their replacements will come from the MAC, in the form of some combination of Ohio, Northern Illinois, or UMass. The 14-16 we have now should be in CUSA for a while, at least until the MWC decides to come back to Texas again. Rice won't get in with the AAC unless UH is gone since they are in the same TV market. Only way I see UH moving is if the MWC talks them into moving over with UTEP at some point in the future. RIght now, the MWC is better than the AAC, and if that continues to be that way over the next few years, as I suspect it will be, then a move upward for a school like UH will look better, even if gets better treatment right now in CUSA over most of the others. TCU and Utah proved that you can make your way to big time prominence in the MWC. Boise State probably will, too. UH will be very tempting to the MWC, but they'll need a travel partner. If that travel partner is SMU, for example, nothing about CUSA will ever change. But if its UTEP, or gasp, UTSA, then things in CUSA become less stable. If that ever happened, UTEP could be replaced by NMSU and UTSA could replaced by Texas State, but that's about the only possible changes I could ever see to the current mix of CUSA now. Its a stepup for our program from where we were in the old SBC, however you want to look at, from conference affiliation to stability in its membership within the league for years to come, if for no other reason than the fact there really won't be any other suitors knocking on the door anymore to the current members in our league. If you are still here, its because you either wanted to be or because there was nowhere else to go.

SMU's name carries a lot of cache outside of the state, especially with the network in Bristol. They see SMU's history, June Jones' success of bringing them up from the ashes finally after the Death Penalty, and, most ironically, the Death penalty itself has amazingly been morphed into almost a sympathetic reason for others (networks, conferences, other institutions) to want to see them do well. And of course, they see a team in the heart of Dallas, who does get much better publicity from its local media outlets than its attendance deserves. When we compare it to our situation, we just don't have their advantages (money, history, and media). Our attendance may indeed be better than theirs by a little bit, but other universities and media members look at our enrollment and attendance and history over the last 30 years and realize that we aren't really giving these better-known schools many reasons to want to be associated with us in a conference. In the end, though, it won't matter for either SMU or us. Major college football is dependent upon so many elements that have to be there--conference affiliation, statewide support, big financial support, larger enrollments, strong attendance, and of course, TV appeal. You have to have all of them. Eventually, this will catch up with the TCUs and Baylors of the world. If you don't have all of these working for you, then your future in FBS, once it gets redefined, will be on the outside looking in. SMU cannot do anything about this, just like we can't. And depending on how things shuffle out, TCU and Baylor probably won't be able to do much about it, either. Houston might have a slight chance, but I just don't see them being included in any major 64-80 team FBS. The best teams in CUSA over the last few years have been UCF, UH, Tulsa, and SMU and we haven't seen one AQ league even come after them. Once they got in the Big East, that league saw people leave as fast as possible and their AQ got removed. Its just how it is. The Big 5 conferences and ND control it all--that's 65 teams, with BYU being indy and supposedly being included in this, too, makes it 66. Depending on which conference survives out of the ACC or Big XII (24 teams), it isn't hard to see where teams like TCU, Baylor, Wake Forest, and Duke could get left behind, although Duke will probably make it because of UNC and its basketball program. I foresee 4 mega conferences with 16-20 teams in each league. Some may stick to 16 (like the Pac), while others could get to 20 (ACC/Big XII survivors) Ironically, there are MWC teams that have a better chance of being included in a move upward than SMU, TCU, Baylor, etc...Boise State will get included somewhere if they keep winning at the level they have been, since they are a national name. A school like UNLV has that chance, too. Eventually ND and BYU are going to get gobbled up by someone. But the rest of us will settle back into a new 1-aa type situation again. And how that will get aligned, conference-wise, or championship-wise, will go a long way in determining if we will finally get into a conference or division setup that would allow us and the former SWC non-power teams to play each other annually. Some might continue playing, but I suspect that a school like SMU would just drop football before it got to this point. Just my $02...

This. If we think that DT is fine and acceptable at QB because he's a nice kid and doesn't cause any trouble, we will win 3 games at the most this year. He doesn't have it. As meanrob mentioned, we have not seen stellar QB play here in a long time. Hall was a terrific bus driver, who I think could have been even better in a more open offense. Mitch Maher and Scott Davis were terrific QBs, but they had the misfortune of being here while we were at i-aa purgatory, so very few UNT fans know as much about them as they would today. I think Vizza could've been a great QB here, but the team absolutely sucked, the OLine was a sieve, and the head coach was a joke. Add in the coach's son element behind you, Vizza did what so many others would have done in that absolutely miserable situation--he kwit (see what I did there). Was it right for him to do that? No, but its not like he was by himself in leaving the UNT dumpster fire to move on with his life. Vizza, in my opinion, was a bad fit for this place from the start. He was from an affluent school that probably had a better stadium and better support than UNT had. Just like all those guys from Southlake, Austin Westlake, Alamo Heights, The Woodlands, etc...they were not ready for the absolute culture shock that playing at UNT in Fouts against SBC teams was going to be. He probably should've gone to Nevada and played for Chris Ault, whom we beat out for Vizza. Otherwise, looking back, I've seen Jason Mills, Jason Attaway, Richard Bridges, Andrew Smith (bus driver who could've been better for a lot of reasons), Daniel Meager, Matt Phillips, Woody Wilson (wrong QB for Dickey's offense), Riley Dodge, Gio Vizza, Nathan Tune, Derek Thompson, and a few snaps for McNulty. I'm sure I've missed some others on the list. That's your QB list from 1995 thru 2012. Take out Hall's time (and Andrew Smith, since he filled in when SH was hurt), you get a group of people that led us to a combined record of 41-121. That's a winning percentage of .253%. IS it all the QBs fault? Of course not--Vizza is the prime example of this point. But it is clear that other than line play on both sides of the ball, your QB play is the most important part of your teams' success or failure. We will never know if a QB like Meager could've been decent if he gotten the chance to hand off to Cobbs, Jamario, Galbreath, Wilburn, etc..behind those solid offensive lines that Dickey had. Maybe Hall would have been Meager-like without those running backs and the stout defense we had while playing against developing SBC teams in the early part of the decade. But one thing is certain--we haven't sucked forever, but if you look back at this program since 1970, its understandable as to why it feels like its been forever.

What kind of binder did he use?

What a depressing thread...that now makes this officailly the 1476th thread since November that has reached the depressing status. These are unoffiicial results, but more votes are continuing to be tallied, unfortunately... Benford'd and RV'd

UConn, Cincinnati, and USF will get ACC bids in the future. I see one of the other eastern schools also getting an ACC bid one day, either UCF or Memphis. . The only Pac-12 possible additions out west are Boise State and UNLV, but its extremely doubtful. If BYU couldn't get into the Pac, I don't see either of these two academic lightweights getting included.

Exactly--we never won the MVC so we never got into the big tournament, but also never made the NIT, in the 60s or early 70s, either. All of those MVC teams back then decided basketball was going to be their lead dog in the athletic department. North Texas State, being in Texas, where football is king, wouldn't make that same decision.

It will get fixed--in 2 or 3 years from now. No money to buy out the remaining 4 years--we'd have to raise funds on innocent students and possibly take away funding possibilities for other programs that we love alot more than basketball here in Denton//UNT BOR

I doubt we will see any improvement at all over Benford's next 2-3 years--he has that much time, people, whether we want him gone or not. But, if he got us back to competing for a CUSA title or got us to the NIT or the NCAA tournament, he would be back in full graces with almost everyone, even if he led the biggest waste of talent at this place in any sport, ever. Look, this guy is most likely the newer version of Vic Trilli. Trilli got 4 years to prove how bad of a coach he truly was, just like Benford will probably get. You will start seeing a mass exodus of the talented recruits we had over the next few years and we will see us barely beating teams like Alabama-Huntsville (which I guess would be "improvement", sadly). Just like Trilli's teams could barely beat some of the dregs of college hoops in his last year (seems like we barely beat either Tarleton State or ACU at home in his last year, IIRC), that's what i expect to happen in 2-3 years from now. I have no hope whatsoever that this will improve at all. If it does, I'll be the first to say I was wrong, but I just don't see it happening. Recruiting is ruined, as is attendance. Nothing we can do about it now, but just accept it. Absolutely nothing that can be done about RV's mistake now.

I think most people actually agree with your post completely. For me, though, if that means Berglund didn't win this spot, then I think we all know that this upcoming season won't be very good. We have seen DT for a few years now--the coaches don't trust his arm becasue he's not accurate and his throws are very "catchable" by the defense (i.e, ducks being thrown). He's not mobile enough to make a difference against a pass rush, either. McNulty should improve after his freshman year of being thrown to the wolves and getting a RS year. But he's a bus driver, at best, so you'd have to have a team that was like the Dickey teams that Hall led. Run the ball for 3/4 of the game and ahve a defense that was way better than most of your competition's offenses. We don't have any of those advantages right now. In a perfect world, you know the exact opposite of what UNT Football exists in, we would have a healthy QB that played up to his lofty potential in Berglund. His talent is way above the others on this team. But if he cannot show that in practice or in scrimmages, I'll be the first to say that he shouldn't play. But I'll also say that it means we win about 3 games in 2013. And, as far as who takes snaps at Georgia, whoever can run the damn clock out the fastest is fine with me. That's a game that should have never bee scheduled, as far as I'm concerned. Just make sure that injuries are limited and that their check doesn't bounce. Since 2005, games against OU, UT, LSU, Alabama, and Clemson haven't told me one thing about this team--its been games against the other OOC opponents that aren't FCS that have told me all that I need to know about where we are at as a program. Games against Tulsa and La Tech in 2005 told us what we needed to know about where we were really at as a program. Eventually, so did the SBC conference drubbings we took under Dickey at the end and under the entirety of the Dodge regime. I think McCarney's teams have shown some fight in them, but they have never had the horses to beat most of the teams on their schedule. Last year, if we had not played Texas Southern and South Alabama at home, we would have probably finished at 3-9 or 2-10 because of that lack of leadership at QB and lack of talent on defense. But I think Coach Mac is getting us there, especially on the lines. Games against Ohio and Ball State here in the OOC early will tell me a whole lot on where we will be for the year. Games against Idaho and Georgia won't tell me much, just like last year's games against LSU and Texas Southern didn't tell me anything. Last year, we competed with K-State very well, but we didn't compete at all with Houston. I think trading those two teams for Ohio and Ball State should be very telling.

I've got bad news for SMU--its pretty much over. I can't see any non-AQ moving upward to a Super Conference, unless the Pac-12 takes UNLV and Boise State, which I strongly doubt will ever happen. TCU only got into the Big XII because the Aggies left and most of the teams in the conference (anyone not named Texas) wanted a team in DFW to play, so Texas basically got talked into it. That won't happen for SMU, just like it won't happen for us or any of these non-AQs. UConn, Cincy, and South Florida get picked up by the ACC if they have more defections to the B1G or the SEC, but that's about it. Those are big public schools that have been AQ and have gone to BCS bowl games and represent big markets, while also getting strong attendance. Most non-AQs don't come close to this. The Big XII or ACC will cease to exist in the way we know of them within 5 years. It could be even less than that, like within two years if the ACC's exit fee gets dropped substantially, like the Big XII's did. Once that happens, the ACC is going to get jacked up. The B1G wants at least two more teams, probably some combination of UVa, UNC, Duke, and Ga Tech. The SEC wants Virginia Tech and NC State, since they don't have teams in those markets. Maybe that gets Miami, FSU, Clemson and Louisville to the Big XII, but it might not--if the ACC lost four schools, I could see them replacing them with UConn, Cincy, and USF, as well as a team like Memphis. From what I have read, no one has any interest in joining a league with Texas having the LHN, nor does anyone have much interest in signing on to that GOR that last for the next 12 years. The thing here, though, as we go back to the original topic, is that a school like SMU has almost no chance of ever being a major player again in the NCAA as it stands now. They are too small and have no decent following. Same with all of the private non-AQs and the same with almost every single public non-AQ not in the MWC. And the powers that be in the NCAA have made it clear that the MWC won't be included in the AQ future, even when they deserved way more than the old Big East did. For schools like SMU, their time has passed. Its fine that they are in a league where they can compete, but they don't draw flies anymore since they don't get the SWC powers on the schedule every year. The Death Penalty killed them, in that sense. And it revived TCU--because when SMU came back, they were so bad for so long that TCU eventually took advantage of their situation in the Metroplex. And now TCU has what SMU had--the prominent spot in the Metroplex hierarchy. As for schools now in MWC, AAC, CUSA, MAC, and the SBC, I think its pretty clear that the sun set on almost all of us ever being included at the big boys table. We all need the money from playing big name programs on the road in OOC. The inherit advantages of being in an AQ league are never going away, instead they will continue to get deeper. Except for a very select few, this "second tier" is our new home until the next definition of FBS gets remade. Then, you will see that group become the equivalent of the old i-aa again. Can't wait to see teams like SMU have to deal with that. We are used to it here in Denton, but a team like SMU won't handle that well. If they cannot draw flies now, whats it going to look like when they are playing Tulane at Ford Stadium as a FCS-type team? Wouldn't surprise me at all to see teams like SMU, Tulsa, Tulane, and Rice just quit football rather than acceptin that fate. They're pride is too high for that kind of slapdown.