xyresic

Threads often shift topics wildly, so I'd like to make one with a high level focus rather than a detail like baseball, uniforms, sushi etc. WB came in and "evaluated" the situation. In talking to him and looking at his public comments a major theme is being overlooked. It is very difficult to evalutate employees and programs when they haven't been given the tools to perform. Look at what WB said about Benford: essentially I am going to see if we can fix up a few things and give him some help then make a decision. They tried, it didn't work and they made a move. Grant is a tremendous hire. He has experience across multiple levels, winning at every stop and he has a great coaching staff around him. The team will take a huge step forward, some @ UNT I have spoken with think 18+ wins is the year 1 expectation. I think WB views everyone in AD department in this way, give them the tools and see what they can actually do once they have them. That is not a shortcoming it is the sign of a good leader. Ben and UNT90 are spot on that there were people underperforming in the department under RV, this is difficult to dispute. But were they underperforming more than our facilities, fundraising, AD leadership etc? Why were they underperforming? As some have pointed out that is a much more difficult question to answer. WB takes heat for "evaluating" and moving slowly, but if you look at things closely a big shift is already happening. The AD department has over 100 employees when coaching staffs are added in, but for simplicity let's call it 100. Already there has been a fairly large turnover over 20 people and probably closer to 30. There have also been multiple hires to senior roles. To me this sends a clear signal that everyone needs to step up their game or be replaced or be demoted. I like this type of management. Here is more money, more support, go hustle and win - if you don't someone is going to take your place. College athletics is a small world. You don't gain a lot by publicly announcing that all of your employees are a dumpster fire and then canning them before setting foot on campus. You not only look like a jerk, you lose respect of others in the atheltics landscape and it hurts your ability to recruite future talent. WB is taking actions, just because they are not incredibly public doesn't mean they aren't happening. A similar thing happened with the Denton campus as a whole. There are a lot of parralels: new leadership came in, fixed large fiscal and structural problems, started raising more money then began replacing people that needed to go with ones who were better fits. Most top positions in the school have been turned over. This did not happen instantly but just a few years later 8 of the 10 cabinet positions have been turned over. Finally, yes not everyone will always support all decisions but the negativity towards WB pisses me off a bit. His major hires (Mosley and Grant) look like home runs, and he has articulated a clear plan to his adminstration to secure more funding. The old AD never did this as simple as it sounds. The adminstration has in turn supported him, working collaborativley with athletics. He has negotiated better deals with vendors and contracts to fix merchandising shortcomings and to save money... the list goes on and on. Look if he flubs something up then by all means be critical of him, but aside from not instantly firing people that are generally disliked by some on this board I don't understand where the criticism is coming from. Building major facilites takes a bit of time, it is not an instant process. We finally have a solid AD, he is calculating and if there is a problem he will commit resources to step in and resolve it. He is building a deep team, gathering more resources, and hiring coaches who will win. He is also unifying major donors. Guys like CDS who were firm RV supporters are now supporting him publicly in the paper and folks like EK who lobbied hard to hire another AD candidate are behind him as well. I see the signs of leadership from WB and I am supporting the department for these reasons, both finanically and on this board.

Dear WB, All we are asking is that our fanbase rivals that of a blue blood of college football squad that plays in the best P5 conference. They have the most active NFL players of any college and have multiple NCAA championships. We will also need the 11th best winning percentage of all-time, 5 hall of fame NCAA coaches, a sold out 100k seat stadium and the 16th most wins in college football history. That's all we need, this is straight forward. We are being reasonable here and I hope you understand.

Copeland was staring for Liberty and Will was his back up. Copeland transferred from Liberty to Argyle for this upcoming season and Will transferred from Liberty to Owasso. Not sure who is left at Liberty.

EK is a great connector for getting donations to the university, and has been a great donor. He's probably the best connector of people the school has had as an alumni. However, there are several others who have given much more with out needing all of the fanfare. Every few years there seems to be a small dust up when one of the big donors gets leap frogged by another who is donating more and we seem to be in that phase now. The new guard seems to be the Lovelace, McNatt and Ryan families. Grateful for all of their support and look forward to the next generation as well.

The former Liberty starter at QB transferred to Argyle this year in hopes of getting more recruiting attention. Will transferred because it was a better football school than Liberty rather than competition.

To add to @Cr1028's post - He is a great recruiter but guys that are being mentioned along with him in the other thread like Kiffin and Davis all have large clouds over them. Heck Wilson worked under Lane while Tennessee had a large amount of violations. My thought is this, you start bending rules to recruit and it becomes a slippery slope. Things like impermissible contact, questionable use of coeds in recruiting, letting in those who don't have the grades or who have commuted violent crimes etc. Before you know it the programs culture can get out of control. You saw this happen at UNC with Davis. Davis and Kiffin as head coaches have a terrible record for the last decade of leaving programs in worse shape than they started. I do not believe that the way they recruit can be separated from this fact. Wilson recruited well at LSU but so did the recruiting coordinator before and after him. He had a great first year at UTSA but in my opinion what he is doing is not going to be solid long term. He is the same guy that coached for Southern Miss, MSU and Tennessee all in a three week span. Coaches will eventually remember being burned by things like this. I'm not going to give a PowerPoint about what I think about or have heard about Wilson. Instead I choose to focus on repairing and rebuilding a program in a sustainable way. In five years we can revisit and see how Kiffin, Wilson, and Davis played out for their schools. I'll take my chances with Seth in that bet.

@MGNation92 Butch Davis had to vacate all wins from 2008 and 2009 seasons for players taking gifts and academic misconduct. The thing blew up so much that he was terminated. There are other examples but those are the most well know with him. Ask Seth I'm sure Davis's disaster is still chatted about at UNC. I'm sure you can guess about Kiffin and Wilson.

I mentioned that Seth and Co. will need to build trust with the Texas coaches to improve recruiting each year. I am not an apologist, I do think recruiting should be a bit better now although it's still early. My favorite argument is look at what UTSA has done. Hmm, I wonder how they instantly have become so much more attractive to recruits? I'm sure that all of the whispers from fans and AD employees across several schools that they are now a dirty program can't be true. I'm sure it is also a coincidence that they hired Bo Davis who got popped by the NCAA. The off the record chatter is that he was paying players then took the fall for the Bama program as a whole. So yes our recruiting needs to be stepped up, but I don't think comparisons with schools like UTSA that run dirty programs are apples to apples. Look at Baylor, their recruiting turned on a dime and they really improved - but there is no question now that there was a huge cost to what they did. Briles was another coach that everyone always whispered about. Those whispers turned out to be correct. I'm sure this post will get negative feedback and heck some people like Ben may not care about the rules - but I do and I'm glad we are attempting to build something with out stepping outside of them.

There is a familiarity with his Dallas Mustangs team. The PG we signed from Waco University played for them last year. I expect his Mustangs team to have several D-1 signings and we are recruiting his Mustang teammate Jase Townsend who has offers from UTA, New Orleans and Central Michigan among others. I know the are interested in both players but I think only Johnson has been offered. Several universities are offering multiple players on the Mustang team and I would expect UNT to as well. Johnson is a consensus top 50 player in the state for his class as is Townsend. Although some places have them rated a bit higher.

Has a few offers currently, could pick up more if he has a big senior year. Good size at 6'4" averaged 16 pts 6 reb and 3.5 stls The DRC named him all area Co-offensive player of the year.

My post mentioned it was the stadium opening and you quoted it in your reply.

Any guesses which UNT game has the highest attendance in Apogee history and third highest of all time? It would be nice to sell this game out to make up for not getting there on opening day of the stadium.

I chuckle at what gets kicked around on message boards in the offseason. What would you like to happen here? The guy inherited arguably the worst team in the country and led them to 5 wins with out an average QB. It's not like this contract extends him out to 2035. The total compensation is not wildly different here. Why is it funny that P5 schools were sniffing around? He's a proven P5 coordinator, why would he only be getting looks from P5 schools as an assistant when he has already done that? Seth turned down other high profile P5 coordinator jobs to become a head coach. That is a fact. Half of his coaching staff was just poached by P5 schools, some for major positions. There is obviously something that is getting noticed around the country here. P5 schools were fishing around for SL but also WB. This is also a fact that I know firsthand. As JayD said doing another coaching search in such a short timeframe was something the school wanted to avoid. Bringing stability to a program takes time. The complaints are not misplaced, I get it but think of it this way - for 15 years layer upon layer of poor decisions were made. This does not get properly fixed in 3 months or a year. It is a process to unwind things and get them in proper shape. Yes recruiting needs to step up, yes we need to win recruiting battles more often, yes we need better attendance and qb play... What Seth has given us is stability and respect around the country. The table has been set for him, now he needs to capitalize on the recruiting trail. Do that the wins will follow. I would like to see 5-6 wins this season and 6-7 next.

Speaking hypothetically (of course) the company tasked with the project had essentially not even begun work, yet found a few creative ways to be several million over budget from the jump. To top it off the company wanted to get lawyers involved, so they were told to kindly exit stage left. In a situation like that it makes sense to find a new company that will do a solid job with out trying to gouge. That being said the UNT system group in Dallas is a bit of a fiasco as they add to the cost of these projects with out providing much in return. Hopefully the new chancellor will see this for what it is and allow the Denton campus to thrive with out an unnecessary handicap.

UNT90. Back in mid season form I see. No idea what the situation is, no inside info so yes let's speculate wildly about this. You are incredibly off base as usual, but as long as you give yourself the out that anyone who disagrees with your diatribes is blindly following Wren then you can never be wrong right? Disagreement is fine, but why do you feel the need to come out of your hibernation on a topic like this? Because you truly care about UNT athletics or because you are a bit of a jerk?

And there you have it.

I think we will have a bit of clarity on things momentarily. Turnover can help with roster composition and talent but high character is necessary to build a team. It is critical for coach to emphasize this point and I applaud actions to deal with anyone who does not exhibit this trait swiftly.

This is why trusting message boards and twitter can be misleading. People often have good info, but might not quite have the full picture. Deals such as this one typically have a revenue sharing agreement once thresholds are hit. Ours is no different, it should include this revenue sharing. I think the university admin and Wren did fine with this. It was in the works after RV and before Wren to help fill the gap in our ad sales. Wren took it on once it arrived. The real problem is that the existing folks doing corporate sales have been under performing. If they had been hitting it out of the park the deal wouldn't pencil at 500k annually. With the new agreement we will likely come out ahead by 200k annually in the first few years of this deal. With a school of our size in our market sales should have been much higher in my opinion. I think over time our sales folks have built community ties, but fostered a culture of low payment for sponsorship that became standard in the community. Time to change that line of thinking and I hope this is a first step.

Mizzou currently has interim leadership - Hank Foley was named interim chancellor in late 2015 and their AD search just started. With out a chancellor under contract there was uncertainty for WB. A new leader could potentially bring in a new hire and that may have not been the best fit with WB. He was receiving significant consideration for the top spot at Mizzou from many prominent folks, but we acted quickly and were able to offer a pay raise and certainty.

Hank will not be permanent. He is just holding down the fort until the announcement is made. As I mentioned several months back, Seth was not RV's guy and there will be an outside AD in place shortly. I'm interested to see what Sicuro and Trip are able to determine. I have heard that everything in the department from customer service, to merchandising and PR is under review.

An accurate synopsis. I agree that the quote was probably "hue and cry" and the reporter probably misheard. The most telling phrase was that "there is a timing for all things happening here" - he is obviously getting quite a few letters, emails and comments on the situation and I feel like this is a hat tip to those folks. It was done with out overtly blurting out what some on here seem to want him to do with a parade and banners. Hypothetical A. Gather up necessary support from the 17 (which is in process, as the number is now lower) and other key folks. Then make a professional transition in 18 months or less. Oversee the process for hiring a solid football coach making sure there is no botched snap. 24 months from now there is a new AD, and a new football coach. This accomplishes the end game that fans are clamoring for with out alienating key players or another buyout. Hypothetical B. Trash the AD publicly in the press and to individuals while burning political capital with large donors, regents and airing dirty laundry in public. Making the program and school look unprofessional to prospective AD candidates and future coaches. I am not really for or against the banner & uproar. I view it in a similar light to the paddles handed out when tourists go white water rafting. They make you feel like you are doing something, while the path is already set by another force. In this case I feel like this other force is moving things in the right direction if you look at things holistically. That is not to say the common fan does not matter, they are clearly key to the success of this whole thing but allowing option A to happen instead of burning tickets and bridges makes sense in my mind.

Another Ben, wonderful! Using some facts should be fun: David Rice has 89 wins and 47 losses since taking over. They are well known for basketball, but wouldn't we take that winning percentage here in a heartbeat? He seems to be recruiting big time talent to the program with a few first round draft picks. His 2014 recruiting class had three 5 star commits according to ESPN and was ranked 11th in the country. His performance has been a bit of a dip from Kruger who went on to lead OU to the sweet 16 in 14-15. Not sure why extending that is a bad idea, his last season was average but the talent seems to be there. For perspective Johnny Jones was 84 and 46 in his last four seasons here, nice performance but the MWC is tougher than the Sun-Belt. Seems to be a similar situation to what UNT experienced: Good to great coach leaves for a big P5 program and a new coach coach is hired. I think it would be hard to argue that their results haven't been much better than ours. The "high school coach" I am not as familiar with but he had 5 losses in 6 seasons at a powerhouse school in the area, and 6 straight state championships. He could be Dodge Part Deux, but I think it is a bit early to call it one way or another. They have won 2 games this season including beating Nevada and have been competitive in their last two.

Lots of teeth gnashing here based upon rumor and limited information. The BOR and administration will keep quiet because it is the professional thing to do, performance aside it would be poor form to disrespect employees in the media let alone in response to letters or emails while they were still employed. CBL and others have been able to read between the lines quite well. A solid coach will be hired and I have a hunch as alluded to in several places that it will not be RV making the final decision, less than 24 months remain on his contract.