MeanGreenZen

Chandler Rogers was playing his fourth season of college football when he became our starter. Cash McCollum was playing Class 4A high school football a month ago. The difference in experience between those two is miles and miles. You can’t count on a Class 4A QB to start Year 1 in the AAC. And Stone Earle threw 4 TDs and 4 INTs last season. That’s not good. It would be foolish to count on him too. Our starting QB next season is getting pulled out of the transfer portal in the next few weeks. And I expect him to be pretty good.

How could it get worse? We’ve basically lost all of our good players. What would be one or two more? Or all the rest of our players? This is a complete roster rebuild already.

I mean, it can’t get worse than it already has been. Might as well stick around to see if anything good can happen.

Their entire athletic department is in the RED. NIL is funded by boosters. If they had enough boosters, their athletic department wouldn’t be losing money.

If Cal is so great, why did they get left behind in the PAC-12? And why did they have to accept a 30% share to join the ACC? I thought Rogers would land somewhere decent like Miami or Nebraska. Cal is a broke school too. Can’t imagine they gave him much of an NIL deal.

He failed to leave a legacy here. If he had stayed, won a conference or a bowl game then he would be a program legend. We will see what happens to him at Cal.

Let’s all tell our grandkids about the magical 5-7 season and the quarterback who didn’t even make honorable mention all conference.

Lol, that is the best he could do?

There was something romantic about college sports when it was: Can the kids who go to my school beat the kids who go to your school? Now that it is just which school booster collective can throw the most money at the best professional football roster, it is way less fun. That is just math. Compare bank statements. You win. Who cares?

How dumb do you think NIL makes Jerry Jones and the NFL feel? ”Wait, we could have just gotten our fans to pay the players directly?”

The Dallas Cowboys aren’t asking me to make donations for their player compensation, coach salaries and facilities. I do not buy tickets to Cowboys games. Every few years I might buy a $25 Cowboys t-shirt. I do watch their games on TV, which helps them derive sponsorship money. For North Texas, I buy multiple football and men’s basketball season tickets and attend most games where we also spend plenty on concessions, donate to MGSF, have a recurring monthly NIL bank draft, watch the games on TV and get my ears on the ball with Hank and Dave and spend $100s on Mean Green gear every season. It is way more of a commitment to be a college sports fan than a pro sports fan. I just don’t know if we can compete in football anymore with NIL without MULTIPLE big money (million $) boosters. But I am willing to be one of the smaller NIL boosters and see if we can get enough of us to make a difference.

RB Reggie Pegram (Purdue) and WR Darius Terrell (Texas) were other P5 transfers who were solid contributors for us.

Nope, the kids who need a year to develop can go to Juco, D2, D3, Louisiana-Monroe (lol). Then we can recruit them when they are ready to play for us.

Redshirts are foolish for colleges these days, especially us. We should not redshirt a single player. Why should we invest a year of tuition, housing, facilities, nutrition and coaching into a kid who is just going to use that extra year to put himself up for auction at a price we can’t afford?

If these athletes want to make it a business, fine, let’s make it a business. The athletes can sign contracts with schools that also include buyout clauses (like their coaches have) if they want to transfer. Contracts can be of varying length and the amount of the buyouts can also vary. If the athlete outperforms the contract and wants to sign with another school, great, the athlete or their next school has to pay North Texas X amount that North Texas can then use to sign their replacement. There are a lot of details to iron out. But something like this could work. Also, I don’t have a problem with players being fairly compensated, but let’s not pretend that the players aren’t benefiting from the institution in non-educational ways. Rogers, Adeyi, and Maclin produced a 3,000/1,000/1,000 season. They also ate the food provided by our nutrition staff, worked out in our facilities under the tutelage of our strength/conditioning coaches and executed a scheme designed by our coaches. Then those players can just peace out and auction themselves off to the highest bidder? No, the school that invested so heavily into them deserves compensation.

Heck yes it is taxed.

I haven’t lost hope. Last year at this time Kai Huntsberry was very slow to take off and once conference started he turned into a monster. Hoping the same thing can happen with CJ Noland. He looks overweight and out of shape to me. The guy can barely make a layup right now. If this team has any kind of chance in conference, we need him to step up and be the player he is supposed to be.

CJ Noland has been extremely underwhelming.

Case by case situation, I am sure.

Something that doesn’t get mentioned enough about the transfer portal: In this ME ME ME era, look at how much attention these kids get when they announce they are hitting the portal. Suddenly their names appear in articles, they get retweets and likes. Their friends and ex-teammates reach out to them with positive validations. And a whole flood of coaches are messaging them telling them how great they are and how much better they will be at this or that school. Meanwhile, no one talks about the kid who just stays where he is, busts his rear in the weight room and makes good grades. Just another screwed up incentive of entering the transfer portal.

His exit message says he’s been at North Texas for three years. If he could play any, we would have known it by now.

Didn’t say it was a nightmare situation. But being the starting quarterback at North Texas and having the kind of season Chandler Rogers just had is a lifetime experience that cannot be quantified by any amount of money. I’ve never been the starting quarterback at North Texas. Can you imagine what that must have been like? It had to have been an amazing experience. Chandler Rogers is selling the opportunity to run that back. Maybe he freaking levels up and turns himself into an NFL draft pick. Maybe he finds himself on a roster with 2-3 QBs better than him and never sees the field again. I don’t know what will happen. But being the starting quarterback at North Texas is still a hell of a gig.

Well, since he’s gone… I have never seen a quarterback fumble as much or as easily as Chandler Rogers did. He also never won a big game for us. If he had been just a little bit better, or could have beat out Stone Earle this summer, we would be in a bowl game. Enjoy your $1M, Chandler. Remember, after taxes and agent fees that $$$ is cut in half.

The SEC and the Big 12 might pick off some of our players, but we don’t have to play in the SEC or the Big 12. We play against schools like UTSA, UAB and Rice. We just have to beat these schools, who are also getting their roster picked apart by the P4, to have a successful season. And we can steal players from the Sun Belt, CUSA and Lone Star Conference, etc. The game has changed, but it is still a game. We just have to win it. And one other thing, the transfer portal is getting all the attention, but we need to be playing Moneyball. Where are the undervalued assets? If everyone else is zigging into the transfer portal, it might be smarter to zag into JUCO or high school recruits to find immediate impact players. At some point, the transfer portal has to become too picked over. This is Eric Morris’ job to figure out. He went 5-7 this year, which is unacceptable to me. I expect this team to make a bowl game every year, compete for the conference championship most seasons and sometimes peak as a conference champion that cracks the Top 25. I still believe that Eric Morris can accomplish this.

Ya’ll realize that all of our best players this season were guys we got from the transfer portal. The portal shall taketh away, but it will certainly also giveth.