UNT working on game at Texas A&M

[foutsrouts]

People forget that we almost beat them one of the last times we met. It was at Texas Stadium and our punt returner fumbled the ball and we lost the game. They aren't invincible. Nate Newton and Micheal Irving were in our locker room at half time getting everyone pumped up. They were on our sideline cheering for us. They didn't like A&M at all. It's the kind of team we should schedule. 

We had a nice crowd for that game, and I'm not against playing them or Texas at all. The cost/benefit ratio favors us big time. If we lose, nobody bats an eye, but if we win.....

[HoustonEagle]

I really really wish I'd saved the Dallas Morning News article back when RV was hired.   He made a specific point to say "we're not going to be scheduling so many body-bag games in the future".  I think it comes down to operating budget per year, and they need to factor in some large amount of cash that we get from the payout.   Seems we will never get past this method of operation.   

I would have to go back and look but I feel like we play less body bag games than we used too.

[untjim1995]

I do wonder what happened to the Oregon States and Baylors that used to come up to Fouts.  Someone on the level of A&M though, we simply don't have the stadium capacity.  Kyle Field has a capacity of 102,512.  Average attendance in 2014 per CBS Sports was 104,298.  Apogee has a capacity of 30,000.  Without moving down to the Death Star, which I'm thoroughly against, how is that gonna work?

I'll tell you what happened. We got rid of an AD who gave us one home OOC game a year against a team that people have heard of while he whored us out for three ass whippings in OOC road games. Helwig sucked as a fundraiser, but I saw us play home games in Denton or in Irving that he scheduled against Kansas, Oregon State, Army, UH, Texas Tech twice, Texas A&M, Baylor, TCU, and UNLV. In 2002, since that was  year after RV got here, these are the home OOC games he had scheduled at Fouts:

2002--Nicholls State and a provisional FBS team named South Florida

2003--Baylor and a provisional FBS team named Troy

2004--a provisional FBS team named Florida Atlantic

2005--Tulsa

2006--SMU, Louisiana Tech

2007--Navy

2008--Tulsa 

2009--Ohio and Army

2010--Rice and Kansas State

Finally, we leave the toilet bowl that is named Fouts and build beautiful Apogee Stadium to see these OOC games scehduled:

UH, Indiana, Texas Southern , a provisional FBS team South Alabama, Idaho, Ball State, SMU, NIcholls State, Portland State, Army, Lamar, Incarnate Word, and the reinstatement of our old rivalry with Abilene Christian. Every single one of these opponents have either played in Fouts in the fairly recent past or teams very similar to them have played in Fouts. Only at North Texas could you figure out a way to get a new stadium built, only to make the OOC schedule WORSE than it was at the absolute biggest toilet of a football stadium in the FBS world.

 

[Rudy]

I get your sentiment about scheduling under Helwig, but let's not forget that he put us in the Big West Conference, which killed us financially. 

[untjim1995]

I get your sentiment about scheduling under Helwig, but let's not forget that he put us in the Big West Conference, which killed us financially.

Oh, there is no doubt that Helwig sucked royally and that RV is a better AD than he ever was. But Helwig did schedule home OOC opponents that were better than what we get today. It was his only good attribute as an AD. The Big West was our conference because we had nowhere else to go when we moved up to Division 1. The WAC wasn't going to take us since they had SMU and TCU already. CUSA didn't want us. We had nowhere else to go. And whenthe Big West quit football at the D-1 level, the SBC decided now was a good time to form a football league. That move probably save our program.

To me, saying RV is better than Helwig is like saying that Dickey was better than Dodge. In the end, it may all be very well true, but neither men got the job done in a manner that helped sustain a winning program, even if one did a little better than the other. Hell, we may have more athletics-friendly regents on the BOR but we know that the BOR has been fine for decades now to just put out a very minimal effort or funding necessary to have a program at the G5 level.

Nothing--and I mean nothing--changes here until the BOR changes its views on athletics to make it the primary window to the university's connection with its students, alumni, and local community. Right now, just as it has been for a long time, if it costs too much according to the BOR's athletic budget, it won't happen.  And the AD won't fight that budget even for a bit, he just nods his head and walks around at tailgates to shake hands with fans that are happy as can be that we have tailgating available, making him the best AD in UNT history, even though we win in football at about .375 clip.

[oldguystudent]

I remember those Big West days.  Not as a fan of North Texas, but as a relatively recent alum of one of the legacy non-football schools.  All of the original football schools in the Big West had either left for the WAC (Fresno, UNLV, Nevada, New Mexico St) or dropped football altogether (Pacific, Fullerton, Long Beach).  For some reason, the Big West decided it needed to keep football as a sport even though none of its remaining members outside Utah St or Boise (not yet big time at all) fielded the sport.  So they got all these schools I'd never heard of, North Texas among them.  That was my first exposure to North Texas.  I otherwise knew nothing of them.  When the migration to the Sun Belt happened, I was actually envious because the schools remaining the Big West were in a pretty sorry state in all things except baseball (of which my school was enjoying a lovely decade-long moratorium).