PlummMeanGreen

For most of the last 50 years of following all this the best 2 words I could come up with (until recently) was “squandered opportunities.” I transferred here from the Golden Gulf Coast (Alvin JUCO) hoping we would emulate UH’s program since there were so many similarities with both metro schools. Well, in 5+ decades we didn’t do any emulatin’, but I think all the pieces are in place now to where we could start. We just can’t let Wren Baker get away. He still has (IMO) at least one major athletic venue to build & to put that one adjacent to Apogee Stadium. If “In Wren We Trust” hasn’t already, I truly wish he would go sit in the former Fry-era MG player Mattress Mac’s executive office & just ask him to finish the project he started with the AC. (Yes, I know the history about MM’s initial donation). Yet the worst thing the Houston philanthropist & its main Mattress Man could say to WB is no, but I’d wager our AD would not give up if he initially said no. 🦅

Gray Eagle is the best, untcampbell!👍👍 Have known him right after the Comanche became peaceful & even when he worked the Dallas office of Jimmy Dean Sausages, Inc.

It’s a prominent book store in D-FW. Not sure there are any Borders Book Stores open any longer. Not sure why Walmart is not going to get some of the Phil Steele College FB action this Summer.

Amen, bro’! Now you’re preachin’ to the choir, Amen corner & all the deacon’izers 😆

I wonder if the author of yet another stadium poll had been a UNT alum if Apogee Stadium would have ranked higher?🙄😊 One thing about it, Apogee is much prettier when it’s near capacity. •••Well into the UH game when the sky got darker, the Wing Zone almost filled up.

Much better with those pics, but when the present Athletic Center is expanded I think I read somewhere that new, futuristic-looking lockers will be part of all that. With UNT AD Wren Baker (who never thinks small) & because of the Athletic Center’s proximity to Apogee Stadium, who would be surprised if we ended up with a full blown End Zone Facility maybe like the Big 10 Hoosiers? ••• “If you’re not building in the FBS, then you’re going backwards” is a recent quote I read.

The ultimate joy of having Wren Baker as our UNT AD is that these kind of ideas,ie, past & future (lockers, IPF, expanded Athletic Center, etc)...(I’d wager) are already on the blueprints of his very pro-active, imaginative mind. He seems to picture what he wants & then goes after it. •••Baker even gave us a big hint in a recent video that the expansion of the Athletic Center is the front-center of his next big project ( & ultra modern lockers would be in such a facility). In Wren We Should Always (truly) Trust. ❇️🦅❇️

👍👍 ❇️🦅❇️

All starters? Did anyone bother to tell DeAndre Torrey that he would have lost his starting RB job to TS had he not jumped ship to go play games before a half empty stadium in (not Dallas) but rather University Park? (Of course, DT would not have lost his starting job to TS). You really do have this knack of looking thru Green-tinted glasses at times. In fact, I‘m now officially nominating you for the new•••”Brett Vito Disses The Mean Green Every Chance He Gets & Still Slobbers All Over Himself For Career Under .500 Coaches Who Backed Into the NT Athletic HOF” Award.••• Really—is this the time of year on GMG that (with a hardy handful) “the sky is falling in almost every direction”; a few want to put ex Lone Star Conference schools on our future football schedule & even want to recycle a former under .500 career coach to come back & give us all those warm fuzzies about those (MF’in) times when we had very low “never to be ranked” goals & many times even met them? ❇️🦅❇️

How many starters have we lost? None? https://247sports.com/LongFormArticle/College-football-transfer-portal-losers-teams-that-lost-most-Tennessee-Temple-Kansas-Nebraska-166255507/Amp/

Sounds about right from the DCTF staff. •••If only half of all these transfers come thru on our “D” this could have the makings of some special things happening. Just check out the list of new players UNT has & the P5 schools who wanted them. 🦅 The guy from Phil Steele’s I ordered my 2021 PS College FB magazine today told me his boss (Phil) kept an ongoing computerized page of every FBS school’s late or most recent addition of portals & transfers so he & staff could better evaluate their skill sets & how they might affect a team’s quality. (Sounds to me like this will all be one big guessing game, but isn’t it most years as it is)? •••One alum told me today in past years when we didn’t evaluate very positively in the Summer turned into pretty good seasons. The TV sportscaster who did their bowl game said Coastal Carolina had been picked last in some polls last year. ❇️🦅❇️

Hey Mo, he actually favors a young Andy Everest? ❇️🦅❇️GMG

Phil Steele’s 2021 College Football will only be available at Barnes & Noble according to their website. I used to get mine at Walmart, Weatherford, Texas, but apparently no more. One can always phone in an order I presume. ❇️Update: Just ordered mine with this phone number & FedEx will deliver mine no later than Friday at my rural mailbox. 1-866-918-7711 https://philsteele.com/2021/06/16/the-2021-magazine-is-off-to-the-printer/

Saw this movie a 2’nd time yesterday & liked it even better. I love that 1930’s era & the architecture in Texas & America, too. Yes, the Great Depression was sadly going on full speed ahead, but people helped out each other. My late former neighbor out here off Bankhead Highway told me hobos would come to their back door & her mother would feed them. So Inspirational. The Texas Pythian Home opened on March 1, 1909, as a home for widows and orphans of Knights of Pythias members. It is still functioning as an orphanage.

Then some might wonder how we ever beat SMU at all—even as recent as 2018. SMU recruits off the ghosts of their past—always have. They have a National Championship now going on almost 100 years ago but few check the SMU home games box scores for attendance in the modern era of the NCAA which shows how few attended Mustang games. Repeating this, but SMU once hosted the #2 ranked Roger Staubach-led Middies of Navy before an announced crowd of 17,000 in the Cotton Bowl stadium. SMU has always been the darlings to what is a very small segment of Dallas. With their latest billboards promo did SMU just discover they were located near Dallas? Honestly, back in the day if Dallas had truly ever supported the Ponies they might be in the Big 12 now rather than TCU, Baylor or maybe even Texas Tech. Yet I don’t think SMU should be rewarded with any accolades since no one has any idea how many paid players they had when no one was watching; especially when the infractions committee of the NCAA was (not) watching. SWC old timers will tell you cheating was going on in that conference long before SMU received the Death Penalty. Some of those Trans Am gifts to recruits to seal the deal as to gain the LOI signature of a blue chip recruit would probably fill a book. After 50 years of all this—I no longer will honor or praise a school that has no problem cheating. That recent quote from the SMU coach on portal recruiting still floors me & tells me that school on the Hilltop off Mockingbird Lane should still have a high-powered microscope on their recruiting practices. Just sayin’...

Great find, meangreen11. The next Fall Memphis would come to Denton. That was also a Mean Green win & Hayden Fry’s last game as North Texas Coach. I had forgotten that we actually beat the Tigers 2 years in a row.

EPISTLE #???...(I’m older so I repeat myself sometimes).🙄 Been following the Mean Green since Fry’s first game (1973) & it still amazes me those on this forum who seem to get off on kicking the school they say they attended in the nutsack every chance they get. I once sat down with Texas colleges 1950’s integration pioneer Abner Haynes & Ron Shanklin on a couple occasions in Fort Worth & they both told me stories that made me damn proud of our school & it’s football program—even in the unfortunate era of Jim Crow. UNT in most all cases rose above all the hate that had been in America. No, not exactly 100% perfect was our school especially when QB Andrew Smith & his educator father came up from Bay City for a visit when “some” from one of our white fraternities showed what assholes they were with their comments aimed at our visitors. (That fraternity was soon kicked off the UNT campus justifiably so). I’m from Small Town, Texas, (Houston area) which had 1 black family In the entire town & the Carothers family were A-1 folk & very well liked. It was in most our culture not even to judge one by the color of skin, but to just follow the Golden Rule. •••First time I ever saw an act of racism I was 12 & at national church convention for a Boy Scout-kind of group & in Washington D.C., August, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was supposed to speak to our group at the Mayflower Hotel but had to bow out at the last minute when Jackie & the President lost their baby, one Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The ugly racist incident I witnessed was at a Washington diner (across from the Intercontinental Hotel) & that was when a white owner was getting all over a young black bus fella. At age 12 I was angry & ready to go kick some white ass but being at a church-related national convention made me tone it down lest my parents found out they’d raised a bad ass.😱 After almost a week in Washington our Texas delegation headed back home. •••The church denomination I was a member officially apologized to America’s Blacks decades ago & did so out of shame & embarrassment for their Deep South participation beginning with the Civil War. (That denomination was the same one Billy Graham was a member). Move forward, America—we’re in overtime & it’s way past time to do so. ❇️🦅❇️

So true, Travis. •••The lead changed 7 times. It was a true shootout. Our crowd was pumped. ••• QB Andrew Smith engineered this big Sun Belt/New Orleans Bowl- clinching game.✝️ RIP, Andrew. (Gone way too soon). ••• Check out the great Patrick Cobbs in the video. That fella’ has not aged one iota in all the years since that 2002 shootout. So glad he’s on the UNT coaching staff coaching our Running Backs. ••• As I recall the Denton High School Broncos were in a playoff game at the very same time UNT was hosting the Aggies of NMSU. ❇️🦅❇️

Fouts Field would only have 8 more years of an existence since Apogee Stadium would open in 2011, but many of us who attended the “Down Goes the Goal Post Game” would say it was the best one we’d ever seen at venerable Ol’ Lady Fouts. Those from the 50’s & 60’s might disagree, but most of us from the 1970’s thru 2010 would most likely not. •••I notice this video has only been out on YouTube for 7 months so hope you enjoy it as much as I did. ❇️🦅❇️

AND...

OMG!😊 When did I say anything about the “6’th conference championship spot?” You remind me of the ($)turds in Washington who sidestep a question & turn their answers 180 degrees from the original question & into a how bad a country America is. (Check out how many are illegally busting thru U.S. borders just so they can live in a bad country). ••• As I recall, when SMU first entered CUSA as a new member the Stangs weren’t exactly setting the woods on fire as a football program, but since y’all won an NC back in the 1930’s(?) y’all were instantly relevant for CUSA. Nice hard work to get in, SMU. And the SMU teams that beat UNT in the early 80’s were Dallas’ 2’nd professional football team. Maybe y’all could have even beaten the Cowboys back then. Go figure... Notice how SMU instituted its post-Portal & massive transfer program almost immediately (as in the next morning?) after UNT’s drubbing of your favorite team at Apogee & that so UNT would not come to Ford the next season to give y’all a double-dosed beating in front of your fine distinguished fans? Would a normal Texas HS recruiting class at the time have done a one pony trick instead? I don’t think so. Mustang Mania! Maybe SMU should be working on not so cute’sy billboards in enemy territory, but rather filling half the capacity of Ford Stadium when y’all even had a ranked football team? •••While on that topic, just how many SMU students actually come to home games even when your team is winning? Just curious—that’s all. ❇️🦅❇️ YOU KNOW— If the Green Brigade brings 560 bandsmen to Ford this Fall to fill out all 560 of their sparkling new band uniforms, would that be half of the SMU student body at most home games? Looking at media pics, it still looks kind of sparse in that newly concocted “reduced seating” student section at Ford to me. Stang’? Really now—just why are you here? Seems to me you are on a UNT forum promoting all things SMU while at the same time your moderators on PonyFans censor anything or any comments that have any semblance of a green tint. ••• At least GMG mods do let you express yourself (but at our expense, of course). BTW, UNT now has the Pope on our side & I hope we don’t hear about any of your group sneaking behind our backs trying to get his Holiness to “transfer” his allegiance to—s-m-u. 😱 ...All the aforementioned epistle in good fun & in the spirit of a intercollegiate non-rivalry. Au revoir. Stay safe—stay cool!

Many will remember when the DFW media & Cowboy fans everywhere all knew Tom Landry & his staff would soon be unemployed in the mid 1960’s; anyway, that is when Clint Murchison shocked the football world & gave “the man with the funny hat” a 10 year contract which silenced critics & immediately all “Fire Landry” thoughts ended. A school like North Texas that has struggled in hiring the right person in past decades (that is, a HFC who’d leave Denton with over .500 in wins/losses) might want to consider hanging onto a Seth Littrell because (1) the guy can obviously recruit & (2) if he can just hang onto the right group of assistant coaches all this will translate into wins (as it did before during the Graham Harrell era). ❇️🦅❇️

Not sure five P5 conferences are going to be tripping all over themselves to add any G5 conference (like the AAC) who would only get into their P5 Fort Knox’esque TV revenue package. If all this recent NCAA 12 team play-off proposal would have included more TV revenue for G5 conferences (of which the AAC will be part of for the unseeable future) I would have had “more than a yawn” response, but it didn’t. The content of the link below all but proves “that the rich really do get richer.” https://footballscoop.com/.amp/news/heres-how-much-each-power-5-conference-made-last-year ❇️🦅❇️

NCAA bureaucrats in Indianapolis have opened up this can of worms that could lead to (OMG)😱Death Penalties? I guess the rule-makers were just bored at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis? "You want people in our sport to be ethical enough where they don't fall prey to that," Dykes said, "but ... you got to win and you got a high-pressure job and you have all these things and then all of a sudden, you look up and you go, 'Oh, they didn't punish anybody, and they're not going to punish me. So why not?” (Sonny Dykes) •••So, uh, who was that RB we lost to slick SMU? Remember his (obviously) SMU-coached comments when he left? I do. 🤢 https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/31477534/tampering-arrived-college-football-looks-nba-free-agency ✳️🦅✳️

Easy to forecast that the conference strength pecking order will change often among the G5. I still think UNT should grow some family jewels, copy 🐸TCU; that is, just remove itself from all the conglomeration of schools (we’re with now) that TCU removed itself from when it left CUSA (& SMU) behind & then we try to gain admittance to the MWC. Yet I don’t think UNT would be pro-active to do that & would have to be approached by MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson for anything to happen. (4 from CUSA West Division going to the MWC would be fine, too). I know, this is all pipe dream fodder right now, but we can still dream, right? 😊 🦅Re-alignment in some form is going to happen again, folks, but where will UNT be this time around when it does? Pining for some semblance of a nostalgic teacher’s college past or—will we be where other former Missouri Valley Conference schools we “used to be” at the same level were when they went “beep! beep!” right past UNT? ••• I know one present CUSA school in Texas who will do that to UNT when we’re not watching (& so do y’all). That school is located in a destination tourist city & plays in a stadium that hosts an annual bowl game. 🤕 Honestly, wouldn’t that be the all time “spirit-breaker” (or as some would say) “ball buster” for especially those who’ve followed the UNT athletic program for decades? ❇️🦅❇️