keith

For Athletic Department's like ours, not even close. Here are the sources of revenue as reported by the AD financial reports. 71% of our AD's budget comes from Direct Institutional Support and Student Fees. Throw in things like NCAA distribution, Conference Distribution, etc. and 75-80% of what the AD brings in is on auto-pilot. Basically, without doing anything, three-fourths+ of the revenue is protected. Maybe this is the source of our problem....there's minimal incentive/need to generate revenue.

With as poorly as we played, we fought back in the second half and had a chance to pull off a major comeback win. Kudos to the players and coaches for making Fisher and the crowd sweat this one out. I kinda felt this one coming, but as the second half went on, I also thought this was going to be such a North Texas way to win a basketball game. Just didn't work out for us. Regroup and lock-in for the real prize.

Is it possible to stay this cold for an entire game?

A topic almost as popular as uniform and helmet talk in the off-season, but it seems like we will be with the Super Pit for the foreseeable future. Given the time it's taken to get the Athletic Center expansion off the ground, I can't image raising the money necessary to build a new basketball arena any time soon. To be honest, with a decent crowd, it presents pretty well on TV for its age. There are certainly worse venues out there. Let's say it's our home for at least 10 more years (probably more in reality), what can/should be done to dress up the place? Not really considering cost, feasibility or priority, but here's some initial thoughts. This is mainly from the perspective of a TV viewer. 1. Lighting. I think we made some lighting improvements a few years ago, but even with the improved production quality of ESPN, there are camera angles where the court and players don't show up well. 2. Removable curtains or something to block off all or portions of the upper deck seating. Artificially reduce capacity to force seating to be in the lower bowl. Can be removed if necessary for larger crowds. More crowd noise? Doesn't look empty on TV but could also look bad if the curtains are cheap or it looks like we're hiding something. 3. Dead space behind the baskets. It looks like we are adding some baseline seating on court, but is there any way to add more back there (student or standing room only)? Players need to get through the tunnels, so may not be possible. Maybe just paint the ugly cement floor if nothing else can be done or add some hardwood to extend the floor all the way to the edge of the stands. 4. Raise the floor? Is that even possible? Maybe not all the way, but bring it up closer to the first row of seating? On many courts, the first row (not court-level) is almost directly behind the scorer's table and team benches.

"Over the last decade, the league claimed key football victories over power conference programs, a successful run that saw some of the top-resources institutions get promoted to the Big 12 and ACC."

Maybe we should have insisted on a money-back guarantee from that consulting group contracted a few years ago to help generate engagement and attendance from the student body.

Congrats to Tommisha! Well deserved. Nice to see Wooten get some recognition too. She's been my favorite player to watch these last two seasons.

A few weeks ago I penciled in 4,200 for this game...was just going with a simple round number. Turned out I was only off by 1 as 4,199 attended the season finale at the Super Pit. Those that attended were treated to Atin Wright's 42 point performance which is the best this year in the AAC and just 1 shy of the all-time AAC single game scoring record. As we know, we had one more home game this season compared to last season. In total, 55,531 came out this season to watch the men rack up a 15-1 home court record. At 4,199, the final game was the second-highest attended game this year only behind the 5,032 that came out for UTSA (I guess we really don't like those guys). We had 5 games (almost a third) with attendance in excess of 4K and 1 in excess of 5K. In comparison, last season we had 7 games in excess of 4K with three of those over 5K. In terms of averages, we had 3,471 attend per game which was down 661 or 16.01% per game. Was hoping for some YoY growth given the momentum this program has been building, but without that big draw game and a missing-in-action marketing and promotional effort during our traditional slow period, it wasn't meant to be. I'll have a season wrap-up post with some additional thoughts in a few days.

We have our foot on the throat, just need to finish it off. No quarter. Bring it home.

It’s almost like these two teams don’t like each other.

Connecticut, so mostly relegated to contributing to UNT sports Nielsen ratings. Lucky if I make it to one home football game a season, but I still have season tickets. Made it to the away Navy game a couple years ago. Looking forward to the Army game this season (made it to the other two up here). Was able to attend a home basketball have a couple seasons ago and made it to the UMass game the same season. Considering driving down to Philly for the Temple game on Sunday.

We currently travel to the east coast (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida - Army and/or Navy only for FB). Is that really any worse than traveling to the west coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah)? Also, it's not like we play every game away and don't have any home games. The other arguments about going west are late games and the impact on the student-athlete experience. There are daytime kick-offs too. One late game or two a season isn't going to kill us. In terms of the student-athlete experience and if it's really detrimental, then we should start seeing athletes abandon these far-flung conferences that make them travel across the country for more regionally-based conferences and universities. I mean that would be the true litmus test if it really is bad for the student-athletes. So far, I haven't seen any defections of consequence. My guess is they are fine with the experience or at least are willing to suck it up for a few years to play against the best competition they can.

Always felt that UNC fit the B1G mold better than it did the SEC, but I can see where ESPN is motivated to put its finger on the scale. Quite the coup UNC pulled off hiring Belichick and what that will mean for its athletic program and university going forward. Whatever the case, the shakeup of college football seems a long way from being settled.

That was the vibe I got. They knew the player's, the opponent, the game, etc. and those around us were season ticket holders. Most of the 15K were season ticket holders, so that wasn't really a surprise.

That's when I knew we must have pissed off the sports gods at some point in the past and they were going to hold it over us forever.

Hahaha...as am I. There was definitely a range of ages and they were into the game. It looked a bit like a ladies night out...nice dinner in a local restaurant, couple glasses of wine and then catch the game.

That last second loss on the Hail Mary in football still haunts me.

Went to a UCONN women's game against Creighton the other night along with the other 15K fans. Restaurants packed and downtown Hartford hopping around the XL Center with people wearing UCONN gear. UCONN Women's basketball is obviously on a level few other programs are, but it's amazing that as good as our women's team has been, the gap between program's like ours and program's like UCONN's is massive. Then there is another massive gap between us and those in the 300+ Net rankings. One thing I noticed and certainly nothing scientific, but I did see a lot of groups of 2 or 3 ladies that I would probably describe as in the retired age category in attendance. Maybe an untapped target audience for our program.

We need to poach whoever it is evaluating coaching talent at Arkansas State!

With the assumption that other conferences want to improve their OOC scheduling as well, isn't it going to be hard for teams like Tulsa (285), Charlotte (262) or UTSA (200) to improve their strength of schedule? Other teams looking to improve theirs won't want to play 200+ Kenpom teams. It becomes a hole you can't dig yourself out of.

Kennesaw State makes an appearance....who knew?

Based on the crowd noise on the Deuce, I would have thought we had more in the Super Pit, but with 3,924 in attendance, we missed what would have been our fourth greater than 4K game in a row. Honestly, out of the three games of Tulane, Tulsa and Wichita State, I would have picked Wichita State as the bigger draw, but what do I know? We continue to creep up on the season average which now stands at 3,422. Unfortunately that's still down an average of 710 or 17.18% per game. One more home game this season versus Charlotte. Would be nice to crack the 4K number one more time. The game got sloppy at times, but I guess we can do ugly better than others can do ugly and we were able to squeeze out the win. Let's finish strong and roll through the conference tournament.

Real ESPN does a much better job of incorporating the crowd noise into the production. On a + stream, you can barely hear the crowd. It's almost like the announcers are in the Pit by themselves.

Out of curiosity, how do you know it's a whiteout game? Hopefully, the t-shirts are white.

Perhaps it is just me, but it seems our leadership is sitting on the sidelines and watching things happen around them. I hope that's not the case, but is there any evidence to the contrary? Passivity will not be rewarded and the shakeups are not over. What is our long-term goal and aspiration for conference membership? Realistic or not, our goal should be the Big12. However long it takes (5, 10, 15, 20 years...), whatever moves are necessary that best positions UNT to achieve that goal should be pursued. Certainly our leadership doesn't think that this is it, that we've arrived at our final destination and the AAC is the best and final spot for us. IMHO, we should be pounding on the door of the new PAC and making the case that North Texas is the best of the rest. We don't need anyone to come with us. If we lead, they will follow.