Mike Jackson

“Grass isn’t always greener” projects a point of view assuming you know what these guys goals were. Who knows all the details of why they left except these young men. In addition to a little NIL money they could left for reasons that had nothing to do with their playing time. Some of them might actually have realistic expectations of never being invited to an NFL camp. Hell it could be girl they are dating or a part of country they wanted to live in but didn’t go because as high school recruits a 4 year college in that area didn’t offer them. I suspect a reason factoring in posting their stats is that isn’t fun to post the mediocre stats in loses by the guys that stayed. You had to go look the guys stats up and repost. I really don’t really want to be rude or insult, but that reads to me it read like loser mentality.

Good luck to them. This post was in poor taste IMO. Also these players could turn around and post on social media that where they are is better that getting bashed at home by over 30 points in a half empty stadium in response. I am sure you would see that as stupid and immature.

I don't have any thoughts other than being drunk off Mean Green flavored Kool Aid spiked with loyalty vodka. Also just the unknown and 6.5 spread gave ammunition to those who had unwarranted optimism. Even I had some optimism when I saw the spread. Before seeing it I expected us to lose by no more than maybe 20. X & O's given good talent Seth is a good coach. Good not great and he was surprisingly bad at recruiting and developing quarterbacks. Also I didn't realize how pass centric Morris was as a coach. That brings me to a side note. For some reason, even going back to when Coach Cobbs played for us, we almost always had better running back talent than our conference rivals. With that in mind and after the Dodge failure, I never hire coach whose tendency isn’t to rely on the slightly or significantly more than his peers. So a spread “Air Raid” system with a QB that is a legit run threat and is built to take that pounding is essential here. The only way I hire such a pass centric coach is they already had a track record of recruiting beyond the nameplate of the school they are at. Because that is the only way to rebuild the roster before the stink of mediocre performance in line with what UNT always has been here starts close the doors of more recruits to you. I don’t think Morris is a bad coach. However I question the value of hiring a coach like him instead of just making Patrick Cobb head coach. They treated 2022 like punt year. Because anyone expecting any better than what we got was just delusional. Seth actually maxed out 2022 which is a testament to his pure X & O coordination acumen. But now with Morris it appears we have Seth 2.0. Best case scenario he will get the best out of the mediocre QB talent in he can recruit here. That and with our reputation impacting all the other positions except running back we a middle of the pack in AAC consistently IF we are lucky. In summary I don’t know what we are doing big picture but it doesn’t look like we really want to win. I am just hoping Morris beats the odds in spite of cultural challenges here. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Nah, we aren't serious about winning. That is why he got 2 extensions for over 0.500 mediocrity without a conference championship or bowl win. If this program was serious NO WAY is he allowed to come back for 2022 season. A ramp up season for a new coach to evaluate and transform his roster before stepping up in competition is priceless. If this season ends up being a terrible season 90% falls on the administration. Any coach that came in here was going to have to transform the roster to compete in the AAC. Seth's rosters were NEVER good enough to beat the best in CUSA.

That team might beat FIU by 14. Assuming they can't cover Maclin. If they can cover Maclin no way is our team covering the spread.

He didn't coach the Boise State game. He was fired after losing to UTSA the second time in the CUSA Championship game. He really should have been fired after 2021 season ended with the bowl loss to Miami Ohio. His last win over UTSA in a miserable wet Apogee/DATCU staduim was a fluke. I enjoyed it in the moment but everyone not recognizing it as a fluke after the followup bowl loss were lying to themselves. 🤷🏽‍♂️

I am done for the season minimally by next game if I don’t see huge improvement. People in my social circle have the strong impression we don’t try. Gave up my season tickets cause I rarely could get anyone to come with me or give them away confidently they would go and stay into the 3rd quarter. And I have no longer ANYTHING to refute that impression. That is painful after over 20 years. I don’t understand what they are doing or why people are donating money to the crap show that on its best days since firing Dickey were achieving mediocre. Maybe part of the reason Wren Baker left was because he couldn't do things like fire Seth after the his last bowl loss or fire Tony Benford his first day on the job.

I don’t think that is true but it is absolutely embarrassing if it and turns my flippant frustrated proclamation that we should drop to FCS now a serious one. A half empty 30k stadium is not feasible going forward into whatever FBS turns into. We are wasting time and money. The longer we do that the worse the impact will be to the other sports I assume we still want to play after the football program is force to scale down. The impression among all my friends, family, coworkers, with no attachment to UNT athletics is that we don’t try hard. No regular good coach is going to change that. You literally will have to catch lightning in a bottle and keep that coach around a few years (at least 5). You can’t fire every coach of the last 25 years due to bad performance and continuously hire conservatively. This is running fans off.

This is poor attempt to criticize people who want better. A emotional dishonest description of what we were asking for. Coach Sanders (which I assume you are referencing as the big name coach mentioned on this available while we committed to playing out mediocrity till the bitter end) until yesterday had no FBS coaching experience and by extension wasn't already at one of the best head coaching jobs in the country, like Saban & Smart are. But answer this; what is the reason that rival G5 programs younger than ours like UTSA, FAU and others hire coach with better resumes? Let's list below for comparison Larry Coker Lane Kiffin Hugh Freeze Howard Schnellenberger Willie Taggert Butch Davis The list could get a lot longer if I looked at all of G5 over the past 20s even omitting programs that have just gotten to a P5 conference the past 3 years. Mind you these are all coach ONLY hired by G5 FBS programs started in the last 25 years. They all accepted their positions at these upstart programs while having resumes significantly better than anyone we’ve hired 25 years than Dan McCarney. I don’t know if they blew it with this hire yet. But we absolutely know that if they aimed higher for a coach with a resume rivaling the likes coaches above had at the time they were hired, UNT didn’t publicize it. And in this market, with a very tired fanbase is stupid. You want to continue to make excuses for this program and cite what it can’t do go right ahead if that makes you feel better. It maybe even help give our administration and coaches the nice fuzzy hug of job security and low expectations. But organizations and people who always talk about what they can’t do rarely achieve anything great. 🤷🏽‍♂️

So if this team needed a full rebuild why was Seth allowed to coach the entire regular season? And I guess 50% or more on this board was okay with that as long as we were one game over 0.500. I guess all the mediocity and blown big games of the previous seasons didn't matter. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Oh, don't count us out yet bowl games are created monthly it seems like. Nothing like reminding us of the mediocre achievements of recent past make us emotional fans long for the days of Coach Littrel.

Maybe read and digest. You can definitely disagree with the premise. First neither you or I know if Sanders had no interest. (The doubt of him coming is a symptom of precisely the mindset we need to chance to change the perception of our program imo.) He likely isn't but you cannot make a legitimate public offer to get him here if you haven't fired Seth. So that 0.1% chance of getting him is absolutely 0% if you don't try Second, it was never just about him coming. It the publicity of making a serious offer. Publicity that tells the DFW market we are trying to win. UTSA went out and hired Larry Coker. That is 2001 National Champion Head Coach Larry Coker. Larry Coker didn't work out for them but the hire said loudly "we don't just want to have FBS football" we want great football. That is what they told the San Antonio LONGHORN market as a UT Austin "satellite UT school" (We are the FLAGSHIP of a University System btw). UTSA could easily hired a cheaper option, an exciting up and coming coach with coordinator experience at a P5 school. Nobody would have blamed them or been skeptical of a more conservative hire. A school without a program or stadium had the audacity to contact a head coach won a FBS championship as head coach. We held on to a mediocre coach the entire season. Their mindset got them 0 in 2011 to kicking our ass in our conference rivalry series and 2 CUSA titles. Third there is no downside of making an offer, getting social media talking about it and getting turned down.

Correction a conference championship game appearance but also a conference with no divisions. Otherwise we aren't in the championship game to lose to the same old division rival twice. 🤦🏽‍♂️. I no longer believe we want to take the next step. They want to give the impression UNT does. That is why Seth was allowed to chase mediocre all last season.

Looked a lot like Seth 2.0 on offense. On defense the 4 man defensive front was different. The tackling might have been worse than last year. The man coverage in the secondary looked better in the first half. Can't say anything about the 2nd, I left dejected early in the 3rd.

Okay, so again why do it out in the open and get turned down? What definitely isn't feasible is doing things the way a P5 does to get a P5 ready head coach like Prime. You don't know what you can do until you actually try. We kept Seth all last season FOR NOTHING except striving to be mediocre, and reinforcing the perception that mediocre is good enough for UNT Football. I believe it is that way because most don't really care from the suites to the wing.

So once the season ends and those observations are confirmed are you coming back to this thread to eat crow? I don't know if he is a bad hire. But I do we dealt with a smaller coaching candidate pool because we held on to Seth all season for NOTHING.

And I appreciate the bravery. I would be ambivalent to a win vs FCS as any fan of a functional FBS fan should be looking at the money spent on it. This was never about just this game result. This is 25 years of mostly frustration. It is also over 12 years of reading defenses of poor effort and bad decision by the leaders of this program. My disdain isn't the problem because I am not the decision maker. It the disdain of people who spend a lot more money than me on the program that particularly vexing to me.

Now there is a post that requires an eye roll. Nice use of family to demonstrate how little you think of UNT Football. That really says Go Mean Green.

Interesting, I was not able to get a hub seat on the secondary market most of last year. And I saw none for today’s game.

He is not Kirby Smart or Dabo Swinney yet and the premise/point is we didn't even try to. That to me and probably many others speaks volumes about our program. Coming from SDU, Harbaugh was a candidate here before he became too expensive to be in our candidate pool. Dan McCarney was sitting at home available when we went cheap and hired Dodge. Coach Sanders wasn't in Jackson State's candidate pool either. And it would have cost the university nothing to fire Seth earlier in the season and publicly pursuit Coach Sanders. He has a network in DFW area where he started coaching at the grass roots level. No wonder how much money could’ve been raised if people believed we were serious about trying to get him. Sanders has ticket sales incentives in his contract at Colorado. He has no shortage of confidence. So no telling what kind of incentives with our capacity for growth could we have dreamed up for him to come. He knows his pull in this area, the football crazy market, and the ease he would have recruiting within driving distance of Denton. No recruit is leaving DFW without at least pausing to consider playing under Coach Sanders where all his friends and family can see them in person. He also could have seen North Texas as an easier and more comfortable stepping stone to whatever he envisions as his 10 year plus home to be. That home isn't Colorado I think, unless he get a National Championship within 5 years. 🤷🏽‍♂️.

I welcome the eyeroller to say something. I am former season ticket holder, alumni association member, and Denton native. Please share your wisdom and how I am so wrong. You like 48 point beatings at home and extending mediocre coaches? Rah, Rah kitty table at 1/2 empty stadium. This may likely be the beginning of the end of having a program that can host P5 schools. Not from just bad coaching but our leadership's decisions being late or wrong 75% of the time. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Yeah, I am seeing that now after over 20 years of support. And I think I am done going to games until I see something that makes me believe they are committed to winning. 🤷🏽‍♂️. Striving to be 0.500 at the kids table isn’t interesting. Now that the university has sufficiently grown physically and academically since we leveled up to FBS we could go FCS for all I care now, especially with this realignment garbage. FCS prices would be welcomed by my wallet and I would be more likely to go.

So you don't try? That is very inspiring to a casual fanbase who you are trying to make believe you are 100% committed to winning. 💤

So you are saying the last coach was a horrible recruiter and this new guy didn't find us better alternative than Aune, Head, Rogers, or Earl? Seriously no longer believe the big donors nor Adminstration are ambitious enough to make the moves necessary not to be left out new CFB the power that be are marching towards. Us not even making a public attempt to bring in Coach Sanders tell me that we don't really want to win. Make fun of the trust fund rubes of SMU all you want, but they WANT to win. They probably won't but you can never claim they aren't trying hard enough. I regularly skeptical of our leaders efforts and decision making. FIRST GUESSED not second guessing.

I wonder if turning over the roster with coach confirmed to be able to recruit beyond the nameplate of the school would have helped? 🤔