BillySee58

Because as long as their are outliers and exceptions, people will have something to point to on the contrary. Especially because when an outlier does occur, people like to drill the point home that an outlier occurred.

Thanks for researching these! I mentioned these the last time I posted these coaches records but lost the research with my previous phone.

Thanks, man! That's definitely why I created an account on this here message board. The sole reason for my posts are to conform to popular, pre-conceived opinions so that I can get as many upvotes as possible. It makes me feel better about myself seeing the green upvotes. Downvotes lead to intense soul searching in order to figure out how I can better post what people are already thinking and feeling. I really appreciate your contribution towards confirming that I am successfully conveying others opinions and thoughts through my posts!

On this topic, he spells his own name Nick per his twitter. @Nick_Smith21_ Which is confusing considering the roster shows his name as Nic. I think either are fine, but he shows his own name as Nick on twitter, for what it's worth.

When did I take offense? And I don't even see that different an opinion from mine. What I did see was you misinterpreting points I made, and explaining why certain things don't matter to you. That's fine that things don't matter to you. People can still evaluate them and discuss them on a message board. That's what message boards are for. Discussion. And I attempted to clear up confusion on what I actually said and have said in the past. I don't mind a differing opinion. And I did not criticize any of your opinions. But I do mind when my words are being represented differently than they were actually said.

Because that isn't how real life works. Outliers are exceptions, not the rule. Study after study shows each star rating has a much higher percentage of players who make the NFL than the star rating below it. You COULD have signed Fine if you were the NT head coach in 2016. Maybe you would not have chosen to sign Fine because you wouldn't have seen his potential, but that doesn't mean you couldn't have signed him. It should not make zero sense to you, as long as you understand the difference between could not and would not have. The point is, if you offered, he would have signed to play for you because it meant an FBS scholarship which he did not have elsewhere. It took very little, at most, actual recruiting ability to sign Fine. It took tremendous evaluating ability and a great job of developing him since to get to the point where we are today. There is! Have you not been reading any of the posts or are you too busy reading what you want to read and not what is actually said, again? I have commended them in many posts for their evaluating skills, player-development skills, and opportunistic recruiting. It's not. I've explained this to you countless times. I grade classes based on all of their offers that they receive throughout the recruiting process. Not just who is recruiting them when they commit to us. That's for evaluating the players and the class, not the coaches abilities to win recruiting battles. I also look at head to head recruiting battles SEPARATELY and tracking how our coaches are doing in that regard. There are many layers to recruiting, and different areas to the coaches, and then the players as recruits and college players. How unique of you. You, along with every single fan. Are people not allowed to observe how well our coaches are doing winning recruiting battles without people like you and GTWT butting in and saying "who cares about that? All that matters is that we are winning?"

That would be a great setup. His younger brother Montrell is built slightly different from Nick. I know we don't think of Nick as a big back, but Montrell is not as thick but is an inch taller than Nick. I'm not sure what he will be recruited as, given his background as a DB. He has the elusiveness to be a D1 back for sure.

For sure. That's the bottom line for anyone. That doesn't mean we can't evaluate or monitor a coaching staff's ability to win recruiting battles separate from how the players actually turn out. That's all this is. And that's a huge difference between us and a program like A&M. We have almost never had that luxury. Which is why our coaches need to be able to sell their program successfully to high school athletes. Luckily our peers don't typically have that luxury either. Often the kids we recruit know little to nothing at all about our program, or the other G5s recruiting them. Our coaches can shape their perception, to a fairly high degree, about our program.

What a steal he has been. I expect plenty more performances like this, because I've seen him do it since he was a freshman in high school. By the way, saw his brother play last night. He is a junior and is at about 800 yards rushing at about 8 yards/carry. Played defensive back on varsity as an underclassman. Would like to see him in green as well.

You're mixing up the coaches job of recruiting and the players' results. That player would end up being a poor signing. But it would have taken tremendous recruiting to get him. You can't deny that it would take great recruiting to get a student-athlete to choose UNT over UT, A&M, and Alabama. Imagine getting a player to choose those schools over us while they legitimately wanted him and were trying to get him too. Then, that player gets kicked off the team before he ever contributes. You can't just retoractively say "well, it wasn't such a great job to get him to come here after all since it didn't work out." Yes it was! What happened with that player doesn't change the fact of the recruiting ability displayed to get him. Then that's a great job of evaluating and developing by the coaches. That's not a great job of recruiting just because he ended up being a good player. You or I could sign a kid like that. Do you think a P5 school evaluating the job Littrell did here is going to look at Mason Fine's career and say "gee, that Fine kid sure showed that Littrell is an amazing recruiter!" No. They're going to see that and realize that he successfully evaluated and offered Fine when no other D1 coach did, and did a great job developing him. Fine helps show Littrell to be more than adequate in those areas, but does not lend credence to him being a good head-to-head recruiter. I get what you're saying. You're trying to say that a recruiting class and the individual players in it should only be judged by their results in college. And the coaching staff should be measured by how good their signees turned out, and not who they beat them out for before signing day. I COMPLETELY agree with that. However, you absolutely can tell how good a job our coaches are doing at recruiting and convincing kids to choose us over and other schools on signing day. Like I said, Littrell and his staff have been able to overcome it by winning just enough recruiting battles for guys like Guyton, hitting on their evaluations like Fine, and scooping up guys at the end of the cycle who saw their offers dry up like Nic Smith and Rico Bussey, and developing their players tremendously.

Was Brelan Chancellor an example of good recruiting because he became an all-conference player? No. Is Mason Fine an example of good recruiting because he has become a great player? No. Both had no other offers. They are examples of good evaluating and good player development. If you or I were the head coaches at North Texas at the time, we could have signed them because we were their only FBS option. It didn't take good recruiting to get them here. It just took an offer. I see people continuously making the point that recruiting can't be judged until those players have chances to prove themselves in college. That's not true. We see how good a job our coaches due at recruiting instantly, by seeing how good they are at recruiting players to come here who have other options. We wait to see how the players turn out, how good the coaches are at evaluating, and how good they are at developing their players. But we see if we are outrecruiting teams instantly, before they ever play a snap. If you understood my post, you would understand that I am not slandering the staff and I am saying that they have done a good job evaluating players and a very good job of being opportunistic and snatching players who once held multiple FBS offers right before signing days when those offers are no longer active. But they have not fared well in head to head recruiting battles and that's just the truth. They have overcome it for the reasons I mentioned. I hope it improves so that we can really start having a perfect mix of top-notch recruits, good cases of evaluations, players left at the end with dried up offers, and player development. Then we can maintain our success year in and year out, which we can have here.

Yeah, I looked him up recently and couldn't find anything either. Just was shocked he got a 6th year at all.

I'm still trying to figure out how J-Mychal Reese got a 6th year from the NCAA. He played half the season in 12-13 due to injury, half the season in 13-14 due to being kicked off the team, redshirted after transferring here in 14-15, played full seasons in 15-16 and 16-17. "Hey, can I get an extra year? I missed half a season because of injury and half a season because I got kicked off my team. So I should get an extra year, right?" Yup, according to the NCAA.

Right. But Dodge was still, I believe, the third-highest paid coach in the Sun Belt when we hired him. It wasn't like we could only offer a high-school HC salary and were relegated to high-school HCs in our candidate pool. We were offering basically on par or slightly above what our competition was paying. He was getting smoked by coaches being paid less. Our peers were working with similar budgets for coaches, and were choosing actual college coaches who were competent at coaching on the college level. I believe we could have done the same.

I can't imagine that was the case with Mccarney. Maybe Dodge, to a degree.

Thanks a lot for this response. Good info.

If we were going to go this route we would have done it a long time ago. He won a state championship last year. Our coaches know who he is as a player, not just because of his name.

In actuality, yes. Often because our AD was more concerned with picking the candidate who was the least like the previous coach. But yeah, I expect a great candidate pool the next time this job opens up, and for any assistant jobs that open up.

Glad to see us shoot so well from 3, but yeah, those turnovers were rough. It's frustrating how bad we are at times at catching the ball. We've been pretty solid on defense outside of the start or the Nebraska game. This team is missing at least two more legit scoring options. I hope Tikhonenko can come back soon and help us out there, but we can't count on that IMO. I want to see us try and get the ball down to Simmons more. He has a decent post game, and I think we could benefit from utilizing it with how low we are on offensive threats. And Temara taking more shots too. Duffy is 3-4 from three in the last two games. He is starting to play more efficient on offense, after a slow start coming back from his injury. Need to start upping the volume now.

Dicky V, take that, baby!

I'm curious, does anyone know if Scott Frost was ever offered the job, or a final interview? I think Zach Barnett reported that he was among the candidates in the first round of interviews, but obviously the last two were Littrell and Meacham. Curious if he moved on from us as he closed in on the UCF job or if we passed on him as we narrowed the candidates. Obviously we're all excited with Littrell, and this is definitely not a "we could have had Frost" post. My point is that following a 1-11 season we interviewed a coach who took a team from 0-12 to 11-0 in two seasons and a coach who took us from 1-11 to division champs in two seasons. Potentially, you could argue that we could have had either, depending on how the talks with Frost ended. I'm sure everyone wants another if-Littrell-leaves conversation, but there's no doubt this job would field some top-notch candidates. Gone are the days where people could argue that candidate pool made it hard to make a good hire.

Yesterday WKU beat Purdue in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament, a day after playing #5 Villanova to a pretty tough game. What is even more impressive is that they only brought 7 scholarship players to the tournament. Not sure what all their players situations are and who they are expecting to get back and when, like 4-star freshman SG Josh Anderson, but they are going to be dangerous. Especially considering how many freshmen and transfers they have.

My theory? @aztecskinenrolled that semester and that sealed our fate.

Calipari has done it at Memphis and Kentucky. As long as that 4 can handle the ball a little and space the court with a jumper, the 4 can be basically a stretch 4. Which is what Temara came here as and Tikhonenko is basically a tailor made stretch 4. Mccasland even mentioned being able to play Temara as a stretch four pregame before the first game. Definitey not expecting to ever see two of Fuller/Arikawe/Zach Simmons ever on the court at the same time. But Temara and Tikhonenko should give us that option. Especially with how low we are on guards.

Even he doesn't think he can hit the three. You can tell by what he does when he gets the ball for a wide open three. Heading into this season he was 1-12 from three in his career. He was 2-2 in that first game this year, with one made three being a shot that he just flipped up so the shot clock wouldn't expire. Since then he's 1-5 from three. 4-19 from three on his career. That's 21% on his career, with really one outlier 2-2 effort that makes his percentage even that high. That's why his percentage is high this year. So if you're looking at just current year percentages and not actually watching the game or using bigger sample sizes, then I could see why someone might think he is a three-point threat. But opposing teams do not and that's why many times when he is on the court the defense plays us to kick the ball out to him wide open and make him try and beat them. His length and athleticism is an asset, but unfortunately we are short of offensive firepower with Gibson and Tikhonenko out, so his offensive shortcomings have been exposed the last two games.