chomp

This was the first game that I have made it to this season and I have to say, I was really impressed with the student section at last night's game. It was the most involved that I have seen them in a game in a long time. Once we moved from our initial dead stadium section to the student side, it was a lot more fun. Heck, my wife actually wants to go to another game, which is a minor miracle. One minor point that I don't understand, since UNT really wants to draw newcomers to games, why doesn't the display board show the words to the alma mater/fight song when it is being sung? For newbies, you feel kind of like an idiot just standing there, wanting to support the team, but having no idea what the words being sung are. One of the biggest traditions at my alma mater is singing our fight song at the end of the 3rd quarter while the crowd sways. Even though that is an old tradition, the words still are displayed for people to follow along. It seems like a trivial thing, but anything to get people more involved would seem useful.

UNT faculty and staff just received an email outlining a free ticket promotion for faculty & staff for the Marshall game. It sounds like the aim is for this to be an annual event. Not only is it great to see this kind of outreach by the new AD, but it is good to see some new thinking about ways that UNT can get more people interested in UNT football. Here is the blurb from the email: Staff Senate and Athletics are partnering to debut the Staff and Faculty Appreciation tradition, which will provide each UNT faculty and staff member with two free tickets. Employees can purchase additional tickets for only $5. The game will also feature tailgating and a friendly competition between UNT divisions.

As someone who has attended his fair share of both Mean Green and Gator games, I was going to restrain myself from chiming in, but here goes: the entire Del Rio incident was an example of how unfortunate things can sometimes happen even when people are just doing their jobs. Wheeler was just doing his job trying to get to Del Rio. Between getting around the Gator OL and trying to get the sack, I can't possibly see how Wheeler could have possibly had the time or physical ability to plan out making a specific hit to injure Del Rio. McElwain was also doing his job, he is in his second year, has a new, unproven QB, and needs to get both the team and the Gator fanbase to buy in to him. Raising a ruckus after the Del Rio injury seemed like exactly the thing to do to show a young Gator team that their coach has their back. This is all the more important for a time that has to travel to Tennessee next week and will do so with an even less proven QB. Littrell has the same job as McElwain, show his team and Mean Green fans that he will fight for them and get them ready for bigger battles down the road. Standing up to McElwain was exactly the way to do that. No need for anyone to hate anyone here. That is why Georgia fans exist, for everyone to hate.

UNT has more wins over Florida than Tennessee has managed to achieve in the last 11 years and Kentucky has managed to pull off in the last 30! For those heading to Gainesville this weekend, have a great time!

I wouldn't give UF too much credit, Muschamp got two contract extensions despite only one decent season during his tenure. UF is now on the hook for three years of his salary plus that of the assistant coaches.

A lot of credit for this goes to the academic support folks in the athletic department. Compared to how things were when I first arrived at UNT, they have really stepped up monitoring of student athlete performance in the classroom over the course of the semester. I now get a request for information on the status of athletes in my classes every couple of weeks from the athletic department.

Petrino is a heck of a coach, but he has no business working in a job as a leader of young men with the kind of character issues that he brings. Between his dumb mistake at Arkansas, lying to his AD about it, and the gutless way that he left the Falcons, he is really a sleazeball. Say what you will about Dodge and McCarney, at least they are men with decent character.

What are the odds that UNT will cancel classes that day (or evening classes that night)?

On Twitter, Brett McMurphy just posted "C-USA/MWC new league will include 18 to 24 members, semifinal and final conference games". Hopefully that bodes well for UNT.

I take offense to this as a UNT faculty member that attends football games. Our preferred pejorative is "self serving psuedo intellectual eggheads. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

I have always wondered why attendance at UNT games by the broader Denton community is seen as such a big deal. I'm a big sports fan but have never attended a Denton high school football game. I didn't go to an area high school, don't have kids who go to any of the schools, and don't really have any connection to the schools. For the high schools to draw a crowd, they have to draw fans like me from the wider community who are unconnected to the schools. UNT has over 35,000 students, thousands of faculty and staff, and hordes of alums in the DFW area. That should be enough to fill the student regardless of whether or not Joe Denton Fan decides to attend UNT games or not. I think that the key for UNT is to market to our students and turn them into passionate fans while they are students. That will keep them connected long after they graduate. I think that UNT has made big strides in this direction and I think that is the key to the future above all else.

The game is definitely showing up for free on ch 445 if you have Dish Network. I am watching it in hd right now.

I like that Baylor is couching this as fighting to preserve Texas football tradition and its rivalries. You know, preserving TX rivalries, just like the way that Baylor fought hard to get TCU, SMU, and Houston into the Big 12 when the SWC broke up.

There is a better chance of Florida giving up football completely and holding debate tournaments in the Swamp than of it leaving the SEC.

I think that there is 0 chance for Leavitt or Leach. I think that Mullen would be a good choice, but after the Zook experience, some Bull Gators may gripe about his limited head coaching experience. My dream candidate would be Gary Patterson, but I don't think that he will leave TCU.

I don't understand the calls for RV's head. The idea of making a change shouldn't be change for change's sake, but because you think that you can do better with a change. Clearly that is the case with Todd Dodge but when I look at the overall improvement in the overall athletic department coupled with the achievement, after years of hoping, of the new stadium, I don't understand how firing RV produces an improvement in the program. Given finances at the time, RV was pretty hamstrung in his coaching search when Dodge was hired. I understand why people are upset that Dodge was kept on after last year, but was the money really there to pay a buyout to him and hire a new coach? It seems like RV stuck with him in the hopes that he would turn it around or, if not, UNT's financial position to bring in a new coach would be better. What am I missing here in the calls for RV's firing?

I'm not sure that I would lose too much sleep over these rankings. First, if you look at some of the rankings, they are absurd on their face. Nebraska Wesleyan University is ranked ahead of Duke University, UCLA, and Michigan. Does anyone really believe that? Second, the methods for the rankings are pretty ridiculous. Half of the rankings come from student evaluations on RateMyProfessors.com and the number of alumni listed in Whos Who in America. I've taught thousands of students in my time at UNT and have 16 total ratings on RateMyProfessors.com, far too few to be a represented sample of views of my performance. I'm not sure that either of those are particularly valid indicators of the quality of a university. Heck, UNT's low ranking probably reflects the fact that UNT alumni are smart enough not to bother with something as stupid as a vanity press like Who's Who.

Since the university has spent so much time and money branding the academic side of itself "UNT", does anyone know why the athletic department labels its teams "North Texas"? The inconsistency has always seemed strange to me given the publicity that the athletic department can attract.

Chicago is not in the Big 10 but it, along with all of the Big 10 members comprise the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is the chief academic benefit that comes from Big 10 membership because it facilitates collaborative research among faculty members of member institutions and broadens academic opportunities for students at the schools. I did my graduate work in the Big 10 and was able to seamlessly take classes at two other Big 10 institutions that was fully covered by my tuition waiver. For members of the Big 10, the CIC is a big deal and will be a key draw for potential new members.

Great post! I have never understood the "there are too many bowls" argument. Either you enjoy watching college football or you do not. I like watching teams that rarely play one another matched up against each other, regardless of their record. I like seeing the respective fan bases fired up for their bowl. For me, college football season ends to quickly. Therefore, given the choice, I choose more college football over less college football.

That's how the SEC does it. Tennessee-Alabama and Georgia-Auburn are old rivalries where both teams are in different divisions of the conference but they still play each year. In the SEC, each team has one permanent opponent from the other division and the other two opponents from the other division rotate each year. The Big 10 could do something similar.

The problem that I see with the neutral site idea is two-fold. First, if you site the games in neutral locations, are fans going to travel (on short notice) to each bowl location as their team progresses through the bracket? It is one thing to fill up 20,000 person arena for basketball at a neutral location. It is quite another to fill an 80,000 person stadium, particularly if fans just traveled a long distance the week before to another neutral site. Second, with a 12-team format and neutral sites, it devalues the conference championships in the Big 12 and SEC. With neutral sites, I could see Alabama and Florida deciding to rest their starters in the SEC Championship if they felt assured of getting in the playoff even if they lost. The carrot of home field advantage during the tournament would prevent that. In the end, I don't think that it matters. As much as I would like to see a playoff, I don't think that it will happen. A playoff would force the auto-qualifying conferences to more evenly share revenue. Why would the SEC do that when it is already getting 2 cuts of the BCS pie during most years? If a playoff happens, my bet is that you would see the big schools splinter off into a superconference to keep the money for themselves. This makes college football worse off and really sticks it to schools like UNT. Also, it has been argued that with the massive pot of money that would be created by a playoff, it would really increase demands for players to be paid. Most athletic departments operate in the red in the first place and even those that run a profit heavily subsidize non-revenue sports with money from football. Paying players would really head things down a scary road for most schools.

I am not sure that Meyer actually followed the Meyer model at Florida. He went 9-3 during his first year (a big improvement from Zook's pathetic 7-4 the prior year) and won a national championship in his second season at Florida. Plus, he did adapt his system to the players around him rather than just impose his system. During the 2006 championship year he started Chris Leak, a senior, who was much more of a dropback passer and was not known much for his scrambling ability. Tebow, as a freshman, was brought in on goal line and short yardage plays mixed with some option. The article suggests that Meyer's approach would have had him start the freshman Tebow over the senior Leak, which did not happen. The biggest difference that I see is that Meyer and Stoops faced very different challenges from the outset. OU had been moribund for some time before Stoops arrived and the turnaround really required a change in the culture of the program. While the Zook era was by no means a great period for Florida, they were not nearly as bad as OU had been under Blake and were only a few years removed from the success under Spurrier. Plus, they went to a bowl every year Zook was at Florida. The one thing Zook did at Florida was recruit so Meyer inherited a pretty well-stocked roster, something that Stoops did not quite have. As for UNT, I think that the situation has begun to look more like what Stoops inherited at OU than what Meyer found.

Since Obama has not done a lot to flesh out exactly what the plan is, I'll reserve judgment on that until later. You do raise a good point here, how do you judge the performance of a health care system? The current U.S. system does not do very well when compared to other countries with substantially more governmental intervention in the health care sector in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, expenditure as % of GDP, preventable deaths, etc. I ask this seriously because I am interested in people's views on the topic: Given this performance by the U.S., in what way has rationed medicine failed everywhere to a degree greater than the shortcomings of our system now?

I always thought that a high school team near where I went to grad school had a funny name: the Hoopeston (IL) Cornjerkers http://www.hoopeston.k12.il.us/buildings/m...cornjerkers.htm