[Benford 2.0]

Littrell is going to go down as one of our best coaches, just like Dickey has.  Unless Morris actually lifts us to even higher levels than Littrell reached.  His first 3 seasons, while not perfect, had generated more excitement around the football program than I've ever seen in my 25 years following it.  And for all the talk about him not being able to evaluate or develop QB talent people must not want to acknowledge that Fine is playing pro ball, Aune got a shot at it, invited to camps, and Bean is still playing at a Big 12 level on a team with a potent offense.  I'd love to have ANY of those 3 on the roster this year.

Morris needs to fix the defense and find a QB.  I don't think the QB is on the roster this year, so we'll have to wait to see who he recruits for next.  The defense, I just don't know what to say.  I'll give him a couple weeks to get them playing better, but the decision making and roster management are seriously concerning to this point.

[Visiting fans]

Definitely more cal fans than schmoo typically brings.  Not more than LaTech, nutsak, or UH.  

[A few Game 1 thoughts....]

33 minutes ago, meaniegreenie said:

That's a small percentage of their fans.  Now average in the 300,000 T-shirt fans that bought their shirt at W-mart and contribute $0 to UT.

Exactly my point.  These are usually the ones putting people on blast trolling message boards and calling into talk radio shows.  See CougarQueen for a UH example.  Or the jackwagon schmoo fans over here bragging about there 5 billionaire alums that bankroll that program.

[A few Game 1 thoughts....]

Good post until that last paragraph.  You really think that this group of fans gives less per fan than the average Texas or Alabama fan?  Keep in mind, we have literally zero casual fans.  Everyone here is invested I’d guess.  There are just not enough of us.

[3-3-5???]

8 hours ago, Hookset said:

We are undersized everywhere. At least you are plugging some gaps and have a chance to stop the run. 
then tell everyone you are recruiting bigger players and hitting the portal for some defensive size because you want to switch to that scheme. 
Play the best scheme for the players you have!!!

Switch the scheme after you have loaded up the players you need.

Preach!

Also…missed tackles were often guys diving at people or on a full sprint.  Good luck with that.  Rarely did I see us square up and then miss.  We aren’t getting guys in realistic positions to make routine plays.  We’re out of position diving at guys.

[Coach O is Keeping Receipts...]

Lol.  Ok.

[What if Seth really was a good coach?]

28 minutes ago, rcade said:

I'm not reading too much into Morris over a first game loss, but I was expecting more than to be completely blown off the field. Cal was 4-8 last season and last had a winning season in 2019. They were only a 6.5-point favorite and won by 37.

I’m more disappointed in the defense and specifically the stubbornness to sticking with that front when it was clearly getting dominated.  I expected a loss was likely.  However, I also expected this staff to have us in the game.  Maybe we’ll see a turnaround.  Interested to see how they respond next week.

[Poll: who did we hire?]

9 hours ago, All About UNT said:

The wrong Incarnate Word coach....

I watched most of the 4th quarter of this game, so only after Texas st scored all their points.  By then Baylor was passing on every down trying to catchup, but Texas st was in a 3 man front (as you might expect) and sending extra guys to get to the qb.  They looked more cohesive, and they also actually got pressure.  Time will tell, as I don’t think Baylor is very good…but TxSt defense is ahead of ours.

["Hey casual fans, get better tickets for the same price as the early buyers!"]

23 hours ago, TripleGrad said:

Just venting:  Ticket office just sent an email offering "premium sideline" and "premium midfield" for the same price I bought my endzone tickets for when they first went on sale.  Way to incentivize early engagement, management.

The same type of behaviour made buying season tickets at Texas Motor Speedway uneconomical, and surprise, those ticket sales dropped. 

What’s your solution?

[North Texas Week 1 Depth Chart]

That defense is a running team’s dream matchup.  We better jump on every team early and build leads.

[Looks like ACC about to add SMUt Cal and Stanford]

20 hours ago, SMU2006 said:

If UNT had a chance to be associated with the following institutions (US News Ranking:)

Stanford (#3) Duke (#10) CAL-Berkeley (#20) Notre Dame (#18) UVA (#25) UNC (#29) WF (#29) BC (#36) GA Tech (#44) FSU (#55) Miami (#55) VA Tech (#62) Syracuse (#62) and NC State (#72) you wouldn't do it?

That is just intellectually dishonest.  UNT would do unspeakable things to join those ranks if it had the financial means to do so.

You guys just keep proving why smu sucks.  A university that still professes itself to be Christian based, and representative of that faith, is full of alums who, in your own words, “would do unspeakable things” to get what it wants.  Money and power have corrupted you.  Being a Christian, I’m offended by the example that smu sets.  Take “Methodist” out of your name and THEN you can act like schmucks.
 

All that said, I don’t personally think buying your way into a conference is doing unspeakable things.  Of course it makes sense to want to play in that conference.  It feels unfair to us because smu already had their shot.  For over half a century (or more?) you already played in the top football conference and crashed out.  You haven’t done anything since.  You have a glimmer of hope now because you have an extremely small number of alums with extreme amounts of wealth paying players again.  That’s it.

[Looks like ACC about to add SMUt Cal and Stanford]

I wouldn't be surprised to see this ACC interest from dirty schmoo being less about football and more about basketball and aligning with more of the presumed elite academics in the ACC.  Duke, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Miami, Notre Dame, Boston College, Virginia.  Add Stanford and Cal to that and you have a pretty prestigious list of schools.  SMU belongs nowhere near that list academically.  With how they think of themselves, I can certainly see why they want in.  Rice is a much better fit, if you ask me, but they don't seem to possess alums with the same penchant for blowing money on losing sports teams.

With the basketball success they had a few years back, and by success I mean generating local interest, I can see where they may be thinking they can more easily thrust their name back into the national spotlight through basketball.  Especially if they are bringing in the likes of Duke and North Carolina to Dallas every year.  Not even Kansas is as big a draw as either of those school's basketball programs and it would instantly give them something the Big12 doesn't have.

I hate this move intensely.  It'll make it that much harder for us to gain relevance in this market.

[Stone Earle Named Starter]

Welp, rotating QBs is not what this fan wanted to hear.  But it’s where we are and I hope we see one of them really step up and leave no doubt in live game action.

["I want Cal and Stanford to die on the vine"]

1 hour ago, El Paso Eagle said:

Honestly I would like for SMU to leave. The reality is as long as they have the money to keep buying players the talent is going to get wider and we can moan and groan but it's going to get harder to compete with them

Donors give to a cause.  If schmoo is stuck in the aac after this round of realignment, do they start to doubt if they’ll ever reach that next rung again?  Does that affect how much they give to programs like nil?

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

4 hours ago, Green Otaku said:

If anyone can do that I guess Stanford can, they have a lot of very wealthy alums, but it still seems reckless. Do they get a vote? Do they have an exit fee? More power to them if they can make it happen. I think the real question is what's in it for the ACC schools? Stanford would be valuable to either the AAC or MWC, but to the ACC it would be significantly less so. How much value would they add? And like you said travel costs are a real thing. Now FB only? I could see that, but for all sports that'd be a brutal back and forth every week. 

If you’re an athlete from the west coast, why sign to play for Stanford or Cal?  I imagine there will be outliers, but by and large you want to play closer to family.  I would think these schools better start shelling out huge sums to recruits or they won’t be able to compete with ACC schools once their current rosters graduate.

[Now That "TheRealJayD" Has Provided Us w/ Some Position Overviews]

Did I miss the DB breakdown?  I’d pick one of the new safeties….

[My Prediction For Starting QB. (It Has Changed)]

Bickering over who to give credit for so we can more accurately wildly guess how well this upcoming season will turn out.  Man the offseason sucks.

We’ll know soon enough, but until then I’ll ride with JD on Stone coming out ahead if for no other reason than he has a great name and I liked what I saw of him in game last year.  He’s got moxy and he’s not afraid to hit people.  Not necessarily what you want your QB doing, but hard not to love that trait.  If and when he gets dinged up, all these split reps should help us have a backup ready to play.

[4 teams from AAC agree to leave?]

1 hour ago, wardly said:

From what I read Luck, who is who the PAC 12 should if hired in the 1st place as commissioner, is exploring options for the remaining 4 programs. His first hurdle in saving the conference is to put together some type of TV contract that pays as much as the American Athletic Conference , somewhere if the $10 million plus range. Without one the PAC 12 conference is dead . If he can get one, which is a big if, then they can add 4 AAC programs now and a few MWC schools later. If not, then the PAC 4 can decide to go independent or join the AAC . The only 2 schools who might chose the independent rout are Stanford and Cal, and Cal has major financial problems in their athletic department. If appears the the MWC is a no go because of the length of their media contract and the fact it only pays $4 million a year,. On the other hand the AAC has an option in their media contract that they can renegotiate if they bring in new members that increases the conference's value. Isn't this fun.

This sounds like a fairly reasonable approach.  My question is what is the motivation for an AAC school to leave if the tv money is the same?

The main thing driving realignment has always been better tv money and exposure.  This would not be that.  I assume it is aligning the private elites?  If that’s the case, I’m all for them leaving as long as that is all it is.

Also, when does a Stanford and/or Cal just make the same decision that the other state UC schools made 3 decades ago, or the University of Chicago and Ivy leagues did in the 1930s?  Is football really adding to their profile enough to warrant this madness?

[My Prediction For Starting QB. (It Has Changed)]

10 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

Max Duggan was not the week 1 starter for TCU last year and Stetson Bennett wasn't the week 1 starter for Georgia until his final season of college. Every year before that, somebody else was QB 1 for Georgia and if I'm not mistaken, it took a QB opting out of the season and another getting hurt for him to even get his chance to start back in 2020 or 2021.

All this to say, can we stop saying the year will be average unless a QB separates himself in practice situations prior to ever playing a game? Morris is not Littrell. Clean slate.

Fair point 

[My Prediction For Starting QB. (It Has Changed)]

7 hours ago, MGNation92 said:

Right, because Patrick Mahomes and Cam Ward are indicative of a guy who doesn’t know what a good QB is.

You know what IS indicative of a guy who doesn’t know what a good QB is? A guy who’s never coached quarterbacks.

Morris has been here less than a year, he built a UIW program that went from a laughingstock to a conference champion. If he needs the time to evaluate his best option, I trust him way the hell more than I trust Littrell or Bloesch.

This happens again next year? I’m all in with you. I don’t think it does, because I think Morris knows what the hell he’s doing. Something Littrell showed he didn’t know the moment Harrell walked.

 

 

Has less to do with knowing what a good one looks like and more to do with recruiting getting guys with straight up talent level to play the QB position.  
 

I agree with Cooley.  We’re in for a less than stellar year based on how this QB race is going.  I’m thinking Morris and staff are going to be able to coach these guys up enough to keep us from being cellar dwellers, but any hopes of competing for a title need to be tempered.  Think 2020 when we were coming off of Fine and constantly rotated between Bean and Aune.  That looks like what we are facing now with Rogers and Earle.  Maybe Morris will stick with one or the other longer and allow them to develop more?  Either way, you need someone to grab the job and clearly separate.  That’s not happening.

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

2 hours ago, Mike Jackson said:

Again tons of schools don’t have FBS football, educate thousands of students, and continue to grow.  FBS programs aren’t paying for themselves in increase donations to general scholarships funds and other non athletic funds.  There are far more universities that don’t play FBS than do play FBS.  Even UT could drop FCS tomorrow and it would have NO impact on their academics.  And even though they are rich with state funding and endowments they still ask for donations.  UTSA was a decent, large and growing school my ex girlfriend graduated from there before there was UTSA football.  So let’s stop the nonsense of trying to justify the need for any of these programs to exist. They are EXTRA-curricular to the mission of an institution of higher learning.  I love football.  I love my school. And I love Mean Green football.  But I see what going on and I prepared for the worse.  This is the beginning of the end and a system steeped in such hypocrisy with no commitment than the biggest check is going to crumble when completely exposed to the free market.  This is what happened to the PAC 12.

We’ll just have agree to disagree.

 Also, this is not the beginning of the end.  It’s simply the reaction to the FBS agreeing to a 12 team playoff model that gave 6 auto bids to the highest ranked conference champs.  Either TV jumped in and said they wouldn’t pay for a G5 getting far in this new playoff (NCAA Bball tourney proves tv numbers drop when blue bloods don’t make final 4) OR the power leagues decided to consolidate to a smaller number of conferences, rewrite the playoff model again and limit who can make it in the first place.  Or could be both.

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

9 hours ago, Mike Jackson said:

Most universities don't play FBS and do a fine job educating.  So to me that argument holds no water.  Taxes fund public institutions, and private institutions still receive tuition fee paid by government backed grants and loans.  So for the most part these schools don't lack funding.  The Ivy League and Patriot Leagues could drop FCS football tomorrow with minimal impact.  You really think UNT substantially shrinks if we dropped to FCS?  I grew up in Denton as a football fan and I had no clue that at one time we played at level that could gotten us into Bowl games with the old Big 8, Big East or etc.  Your average student in the North Texas region has no clue what level of football we play nor has watched a game. 

If government funding pays for everything, why do schools so aggressively seek donations?

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

2 hours ago, Mike Jackson said:

I can definitely understand the anti ESPN sentiment. However  ALL CFB problems can be traced back to the greed of the schools.  As the payouts for their media rights, ticket sales and etc skyrocketed, that money could've went to education.  These programs have been run like business without the real financial responsibility to be 100% self sufficient and turn a profit. Looking at our own program I don't believe it could responsibly pay a head coach a million dollars if the mandate was for the program to have a balanced budget. 

There was always enough money to go around for about a 100 universities to play FBS.  At least half of all media revenue generated should be in a pot distributed equally to give each program an operating budget floor.  A system where UCLA is making 4 times more than Cal within the same university system playing the same level of sport is just ridiculous.  And there are more egregious examples of this in other states that we are just comfortable with because that is just the way it has always been.  The BUSINESS of football made Haden Fry leave.  Because our program wasn't getting what it deserved base on its on the field performance.   And make no mistake this will continue with this super conference system.  These teams can't play everyone in their conference and even inside conferences their strength of schedules can be very different.  Conferences won't even have true champions unless they have a in conference playoff.  So it is the colleges that were always willing to take a massive 💩on tradition for bigger checks.  Now they have become so dependent on those checks living beyond their means that budget wise many can't say no for the good of their student athletes.  Their long standing hypocrisy is now laid bare in the destruction of a great conference.  And now their long time Rose Bowl partner/rival is like Marilyn Monroe bastardized for 2023 with a BBL, caterpillar fake lashes, cartoonish makeup, and 20 pounds of saline in her breast.  Very appropriate that the last official Pac 12 game will be in a dome staduim (looking nothing like the sun drenched packed stadiums of a late afternoon in Berkeley, Tucson, or Eugene with mountains in the background) in Las Vegas where hubris and greed has been the downfall of many. 🤷🏽‍♂️

You’re right about it coming down to the schools, but a little off on the reasons.  Forget football.  All of us are competing against each other as schools, first.  Competing for the best teachers, facilities, etc so we can attract top students and then turn them back into donors and the cycle feeds into itself.  It’s proven that big time football programs help drive up donations, student applications and a host of other things that all lead to more money for the school.  Nobody is fixing this football conference problem without first addressing the how schools are funded.  Pay attention to who makes conference affiliation decisions.  It’s not the athletic department.  It’s the Presidents.

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

I’m for any scenario where the private elites(in their own minds) split off and form their own league.  The southwest needs an Ivy League for smu to take all their money to.  So sick of seeing these schools get included in scenarios where it is clear they don’t pass muster without a billionaire in the shadows greasing the league presidents pockets.

[PAC 12 Realignment Talk Mega Thread (All 12 threads merged)]

@Cerebus What value does A5 status actually hold?  Are we overvaluing this?