North Texas aims to improve; ranked No. 109

[untjim1995]

According to USA Today, McCarney's 2014 salary ranked 84th out of the 128 FBS teams. If that's the extent to which we are able to "open up the checkbook for him," then we ought to be mighty grateful that there are now 42 bowl games.

I learned something on this thread--something that many of you probably can't believe I could do!! But our outlay of cash for McCarney is fairly impressive against our G5 peers. One thing it does reiterate to me, though, is that the G5s and the top end of the FCS really need to look at how they will need to build up their future division of college football, where they can actually compete financially with each other.

When you look at the list of 128 schools, for whatever reason, USC, BC, Wake Forest, BYU, Syracuse and Vandy are listed at the bottom, since they didn't get information reproted to them by those private schools. There is absolutely no way we pay better than any of them, for obvious P5 rea$on$. Temple also didn't report, either, but I could see us paying close to them. So that said, we know that there are 128 schools that are FBS. And let's assume that Temple, because of the AAC affiliation, does pay more for their head coach than we do. That means there are 22 schools that pay more that us. SMU is at the top of the G5 list (shocker..) at 48th overall. Our outlay of cash puts us in front of 37 other FBS schools, including CUSA foes, USM (86th), Marshall (88th), WKU (89th), FIU (93rd), La Tech (97th), UTEP (98th), UAB (100th), FAU (101st), ODU (102nd), and UTSA (110th), as well as Texas State at 112th. Only Rice (82nd) and MUTS (79th) pay more than us in CUSA. So you can say that we are in the range we should be for our level of play. Its my issue with these lists is that we are included with P5 NFL-lite programs that we can never compete with.

Our problem, though, is that we have usually been at the bottom of pay on these lists (before Apogee) and we have never had any big win to make the general public grab interest in our program. When the media reports on the landscape of college football in this state, what they see is that we pay better than 3 of the other Texas schools, but the ones that we trail are the P5s, as well as the old SWC teams in SMU (48th), UH (69th), and Rice (82nd). And its that history that makes it really tough to break thru, without any reason for that media to get excited about our program.