Anyone here remember the Jankovich era at UNT?

greenjoe · March 15, 2021

One wonders if Southern Meth won’t play North Texas in BB because of Jank or because of a higher up in athletics (AD ? President ?).

Edited March 15, 2021 by greenjoe

drex · March 15, 2021

Proud to say Jankovich is a friend of mine. He is a class act who deserved better than Craig Helwig as AD. The real reason for his firing has not even been mentioned in the previous posts.

stl.pony · March 15, 2021

19 hours ago, eulessismore said:

Didn't he come expecting to be head coach in waiting, which is actually what happened? Kind of a strange way of getting a HC job, but maybe it all happened the way it was supposed to, except that Jank didn't meet the expectations y'all had.

Jank left a head coach job to be an assistant here at SMU. Just a bizzare career move.

stl.pony · March 15, 2021

4 hours ago, drex said:

Proud to say Jankovich is a friend of mine. He is a class act who deserved better than Craig Helwig as AD. The real reason for his firing has not even been mentioned in the previous posts.

Care to tell us the real reason? It's been 20 years ...

drex · March 15, 2021

No.

PlummMeanGreen · March 16, 2021

2 hours ago, drex said:

No.

drex, weren’t you on the Athletic Dept. staff during the Jank’ era? Had he had a bigger budget he’d probably been a success, right?

GreenFlag · March 16, 2021

5 hours ago, stl.pony said:

Jank left a head coach job to be an assistant here at SMU. Just a bizzare career move.

He left to be head coach at SMU. Then SMU was able to hire Brown. Then came the head coach in waiting thing.

stl.pony · March 16, 2021

13 hours ago, GreenFlag said:

He left to be head coach at SMU. Then SMU was able to hire Brown. Then came the head coach in waiting thing.

This is incorrect. HCIW was forced on Larry Brown given his tendency to abruptly leave places.

wardly · March 16, 2021

On 3/14/2021 at 8:16 PM, stl.pony said:

Jank is an odd man. He left a HC job at Illinois state to take an assistant job at SMU. Just an odd thing to do.

If you look at most college coaches resumes they look like they are running from the law. If memory serves [ I am 78 ] Jank interviewed for the SMU head coaching position which went to Larry Brown. SMU was so impressed with Jank that they offered him $500,000 per year [ which was more than he was paid at Illinois State]to be "coach in waiting" anticipating that Brown would not be around long. I think he has done a good job for the Mustangs in a tough basketball conference.

meanrob · March 16, 2021

He had some, shall we say, maturity issues while at NT. Everybody liked him but there’s more than that to leading a program.

He had a few good recruits, including a highly rated one from Carter (Robert Washington) but his roster was a mish mash of athletes and slow tempo guys. He beat a few in state programs but if I remember right he lost some guys when he slowed the tempo down. When we lost twice to Idaho his last year I remember thinking “this ain’t working.”

I liked David Miller, Pooh, Sean and some of the other players on those teams.

Then we brought in Mr. Texas and that didn’t work either.

I felt really old when I read he’s 61.

untjim1995 · March 16, 2021

Jank had the right resume for the job—assistant under Eddie Sutton at OSU and was a very good player at K-State.

His teams were tough and they played to the level of competition too often. They could beat the old SWC teams but lose to SLC teams. When we joined the Big West, we didn’t beat one team in our division, which was Idaho, Boise State, Utah State, Nevada, and New Mexico State. None of those programs were bad, but it was rather obvious we had stepped up big time in competition from the SLC days and Jank knew it. So when Helwig proposed an OOC schedule to pay the bills, Jank knew his time was short at UNT and that was it. So Helwig hires Vic Trilli from UT and he says all the right things about building us up just like they did in Austin by playing these impossible schedules....and Maryland beat us by 75. TCU beat us by 50. We got beat by Oklahoma State badly, Arkansas badly, Texas, etc...it was just stupid to schedule this way for a place that wasn’t funded for winning in the SLC, much less the Big West.