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From the first day Tony Benford took the helm as Mean Green men’s basketball coach in April, he set out to bring in close friend Rob Evans to assist him in his new campaign with UNT. “It was very important to me to bring him in,” Benford said. “He was the person on the top of the list no matter what head coach job I would get. Coach [Evans] has been through it all. There isn’t a situation he doesn’t know how to handle.” In 1968, when his playing career at New Mexico State University came to an end, Evans became the third African-American Division I coach in NCAA basketball history when he joined the Aggies staff after his senior season. “I remember the other assistant coach on the staff asking me what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘I want to be a head coach at a major college,’” Evans said. “His response was that I need to shoot my sights a little shorter…and that challenged me.” From playing under Hall of Fame head coach Ralph Tasker at Hobbs High School to becoming an All-American at Lubbock Christian University to appearing in the final four with NMSU and being named National Coach of the Year in 1997 with the University of Mississippi, Evans has no shortage of accolades under his belt. Every day Evans still wears his 1968 Final Four ring that he earned as a player at NMSU, but another one of his accomplishments stands out. Evans was the first African-American head coach at Ole Miss in 1992. read more: http://wordpress1.cws.unt.edu/?p=2252

Bart Lundy’s tenure at North Texas was a short one. He stayed just a year before accepting the head coaching job at Queens in Charlotte. We talked about Lundy’s decision to head back to the school where he started his career as a head coach last night. The interesting aspect of how it all played out is that one of the big selling points for Benford when he took his first job as a head coach is that he could bring a pair of veteran head coaches with him to UNT in Lundy and Rob Evans, who is still on staff. So the question now becomes: Where does UNT go from here? It’s getting a little late in the summer for coaches to pick up and move. The name that a lot of people have brought up and makes a lot of sense is Bubba Jennings, a former Texas Tech assistant who played at Tech with Benford. Both Jennings and Benford are from New Mexico. Texas Tech just changed coaching staffs with Tubby Smith taking over the program. That put Jennings on the market. Read more: http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2013/07/thoughts-on-the-departure-of-bart-lundy-and-where-unt-goes-from-here.html/

Here is the package I put together on Tony Mitchell and UNT’s draft party last night. A video interview with UNT assistant coach Rob Evans and Matt Walsh is above. Walsh, one of UNT’s managers, is a good friend of Mitchell. CLICK HERE TO LINK TO VIDEO