untjim1995

Oh, listen, I cannot believe yall haven't sued the NCAA of billions of dollars. For back pay for killing your program. Yall just laid the groundwork for how painful a Death Penalty is to a program, so fine upstanding programs like Baylor, who saw players rape and kill people, as well as Penn State. who looked the other way at pedophilia in their own facilities by coaches, never got a deserved death penalty. But I will also say that nobody else had a payroll that involved the governor of a state to keep this all under wraps. Yall made it an artform...

But that's the problem. We don't have those alumni that care about anything up here. Athletics or music or arts. Denton is a weird town for sure. I think we have like the third lowest alumni giving in the conference. But you cannot make people care about something that they don't want to care about. The entire city of Denton, the faculty and administration at UNT, the alumni, and the majority of the student body here have either been completely apathetic to sports or they actively loathe its existence. Its how a school with 40k in enrollment, 250k in living alumni, and being surrounded by millions of people in DFW can draw an average of about 15k in attendance for football. So yeah, that's not nearly as simple as you want to make it out to be. Its the opposite of you guys, where you have very small numbers for everything except cash on hand. And y'all have a media that still acts sympathetic to your Death Penalty and will carry your water for you. We don't have anything like this. Hell, most DFW media barely cares that we exist, too.

Oh, I don't think they will be a power. But these schools will have some stupid setup that means avoiding being in a conference with teams that they consider beneath them.

It's all about how this gets settled now. FSU, Clemson, Georgia Tech, UNC, Miami, Duke, UVa, Va Tech, NC State, Louisville, Pitt, and Syracuse will find homes in the Big Three Conferences that will be left. My guess is that the B1G gets UVa, UNC, Duke, and Georgia Tech, the SEC gets Va Tech, NC State, FSU, Clemson, Pitt, and Miami. Louisville and Syracuse will go to the Big 12, probably with UConn and Stanford. Cal gets WSU and OSU to join their new far flung setup with BC, SMU, and Wake Forest, while they add in Memphis, Temple, Tulane, USF, ECU, and FAU to join their league.

I've said this exact thing for years. Those NFL-lite and NBA-lite schools need to separate completely. Move on to their New Minor League setup. And let the rest of us compete against peers in a structure that makes sense, from a cost standpoint. I would love to have UNT in a league that has the current AAC, MWC, CUSA, MAC, and SBC schools, as well as the former power programs that get left behind, like Washington State and Oregon State have already experienced.

That makes sense. And now the legislatures and state Supreme Courts will have the Power school's backs if anyone fights this in state.

Anyone could see this coming as you looked at the landscape the Supreme Court allowed with NIL and the NCAA allowed with the portal.

The fact is that they will let the market decide this. We will see the eventual breakaway and the NCAA schools will probably look like the current G5s and FCS. Whether it’s scholarship only, w-2 employees, or 1099s as consultants, college football and basketball will look so completely different from 25 years ago. If the market allows us to be in one of those levels, then that’s what it will be. It gives cover to the university’s leadership to avoid having to face another self-demoting decision.

Our location and affordability is awesome for first gen students…and a lot of our student body are working to pay their way thru UNT. Add in a metro area that is now the 4th largest media market in the country, due to all of the folks who have moved here and it’s pretty easy to see.

Exactly how are they suppose to “clean up”? With our massive NIL? With our incredible following? Because of our incredible success? You get talented players by offering them money, playing time, visibility, and success. We have very little money, lots of playing time, visibility is what it is here, and almost zero success in 45 years that anyone beyond the diehards know about.

Because G5 players aren't leaving because they are buried on the depth chart and can get playing time at some P4, they are leaving because they can play at this level and the P4 schools know they can buy them away easily. Y'all will use your money, just like y'all always do, to buy players away from G5s now that you're in the ACC. Before, you could take advantage of Power kids transferring to you for playing time and money against G5s. Now, you'll switch this up and raid Denton, San Antonio, Ruston, Tulsa, etc... That's just not worth my time or money. I got better things to do. If others feel differently, that's awesome. But that's 180 degrees away from the college sports I enjoyed as a young man and adult.

Memphis just got FedEx to pony up $25 million for the next 5 years for NIL for football, hoops, and other women's sports. That's not counting their money they give for sponsorship of their athletic department. We have nothing like this. Maybe some G5s do, but most don't.

Absolutely--all of this. My son is going off to college in the fall. Both of his parents are UNT grads, but he wanted nothing to do with coming here, because he wanted to go somewhere that had good academics AND that athletics mattered, just like his best friends and cousins all felt. So, he's heading to one of those P4s and we are very excited for him. I just think if we hadn't given up after the SWC pipe dream was burst, it would've been different here...a lot different, too. Again, I think UH was who we could've been just like. In the mid-to-late 70s, our programs were very similar. Both were successful as independents. UH got into the SWC because they only had little ol' Rice to compete with in their market. And they were hugely successful immediately, in both major sports. That got a lot of Houston Energy Money to be invested in their program. We could've emulated that in some fashion, but instead, Hayden Fry leaves and we eventually gave up. That was just too much to overcome, particularly in the timeframe you mention above. UCF moved up to FBS right around the time we made our way back up in 1995. But they didn't have alumni and students that watched their school blow off sports for 12 years like we did. They went about building up a program in a manner that made sense and today, they are in the Big 12. No reason at all that we couldn't have been something like this today if we had made athletics a priority. Instead, we decided that I-A was a way to make more money by whoring out the program and playing at a toilet for decades. Those decisions still have ramifications that killed any chance of us being anything close to what we wanted to be. And the portal bit has killed college sports for me. I literally watched about 3 games of college football last year. And college basketball, which is my first love, is also losing its appeal, too. The NIL, while I'm not a fan of it, I understand why its there. The portal, though, is just too much for me to accept. It's just not worth my time or money to invest in it when the players are using that system to move up from Denton as soon as they can. I don't blame them, either. But college sports was built on familiarity and the players being "ours". That's just no longer a viewpoint that I feel anymore when any player that produces in any fashion just can leave at any time they choose.

You'll see that you will enjoy your time and money a lot more. I quit about 2 years ago, when it became apparent that G5s were just minor leagues for the P5s. I knew it was coming, as I posted about this exact situation for years before on here. And there will be many others that are much higher up the foodchain than us who will see this happen to. I see the breakaway having 30-50 schools for their own athletics. Really, if the top 24 schools wanted to form their own setup, they could easily. Texas, A&M, OU, LSU, etc...they all have the eyeballs and the media and the legislative support from their states. I loved getting 6+ hours back on Saturdays in the fall. I loved using those funds towards family trips and better entertainment opportunities for all of us. like concerts and golf. To be honest, the time was better to get back than the money. More time with family and friends on the weekend, as well as more time for stuff with church and the community was the best surprise of all. I don't even blame players for getting theirs, either. More money and more exposure in the P5s that these guys grew up rooting for and dreaming of playing for all adds up to an easy decision for these guys. Basically, the players are catching up to what the coaches got to do without any qualms for years. Again, if we hadn't quit on the program back in the early 80's with the ridiculous drop down to i-aa when the SWC was one of the kings of the NCAA, it just nuked the program. You lost generations of fans and alumni from the past and the future, most of whom just picked up another school to root for or just become pro fans only, all while completely dropping the program's status with TX HS coaches and parents, maybe things would be different today, I'd like to guess at a minimum, we could have been a UH type program, maybe higher because of our location. Had we had any vision, the old Big Eight would have been the perfect conference to go all in to join instead of the SWC. We could have given that entire league a DFW presence, instead of just OU. And getting to play OU, Nebraska, Colorado, OSU, KU, KSU, Missouri, and ISU as conference mates in both football and hoops would have jumped us over ALL of the SWC privates. UH and Tech would've been peers instead of being steps above us as SWC members. But we didn't...we just gave up.

Steve Sloan dies at 79: Ex-Ole Miss coach won two national titles as player under 'Bear' Bryant at Alabama - CBSSports.com Not sure why our alma mater wasn't listed, but he was the AD for my first few years here in Denton while I was a student. Even got to do an interview with him for a communications class when I was a sophomore. He admitted to me that day in his office that the administration just didn't support sports enough to compete with the schools in the SWC back then and that it was really frustrating.