untjim1995

Nice hire, RV. Shanice Stephens and Todd Dodge think Benford is doing a great job!!

Not quite--Dickey beat them in his last season here, costing SMU and Phil Bennett a bowl bid, as they finished 5-7. The next year, Todd Dodge's team lost a tough one in Dallas, which was Phil Bennett's only win that year, which was his last.

I give their leadership a ton of credit. Hiring Larry Brown to coach at his age, when he hasn't coached college basketball since 1988, and also buying off Jankovich to be the coach-in-wating from his Illinois State head coaching gig took some major boldness and dollars to commit. I get that they have money to throw around down there because of their alumni, but the boldness part, at least for now, is really paying off. Next year, when the AAC loses Louisville, SMU might just be one of the top 4 teams to win that league, with Cincy, Memphis, and UConn. That is incredible to type, much less believe, but it really does make you realize just how dormant their hoops program was under Doherty and the coaches before him. Shocking how much coaching actually matters, huh? (See Brown at SMU and Benford at UNT)

No doubt--even playing a bad Temple team this year gets a good crowd, just off name recognition.

RV has the mother of all excuses to keep Benford around.... 3 more years of his contract to buy out. Benford is gonna be here next year, for sure, and going on the track record, probably the year after, too, when he will then be considered affordable to be bought out, with a year left on the contract. Its what we always do in the mens sports. You make a bad hire, you suffer until the university deems it affordable to go in another direction. Just pray RV has nothing to do with hiring the next coach.

SMU had Romo, Garrett, Buck Showalter, Clark Hunt, and Mayor Rawlings in attendance last night. They got Mudiay committed and will have five star recruit Elijah Thomas coming to Moody this weekend against Cincy. I have to admit that I never thought Larry Brown could make THAT kind of impact so quickly. Jankovich may have a helluva program to lead when LB steps down or dies... I know it is easier to get those types of folks out to University Park when they are good and playing bigger named teams, but it does surprise me to see how many media folks are talking them up right now in DFW. We never got that kind of treatment from the local press when JJ was coaching here in his latter eyars, other than an occasional "JJ is the best college hooops coach in the Metroplex" kind of mention from Newy or Dale. I guess the SMU $$$ still attracts attention.

I saw this, too...it just illustrates the huge advantage that TCU has being in FW with their own media outlet. Just about all of this would make you think that the Aggies and Frogs were equals right now, which couldn't be further from the truth.

To double the crowd size, different? It was the season opener and we still had 30k+ in enrollment, plus Dickey was still early in his career here. I just think its about being perceived a winner and playing someone that matters here in town. TCU, for all their improvement, still won't get a SRO at Amon Carter Stadium unless they are really good AND the opponent is a top name team. I suspect that it would be the same at SMU, too. And although their enrollment and alumni bases are smaller than ours, their cities population is much bigger than Denton, so I think it is fair to compare us to them. But you can look at UH and they have the same deal we do--it depends on who they play while they are winning. I guess its just part of being a college that sits inside of a major media market that has several professional and collegeiate options for your dollar. But those schools all have a huge advantage of who typically shows up on their OOC schedule at home versus us...

The bolded two points above are what need to happen to move us up in the interest of casual fans and the sports media around here. Hell, giving Georgia a game for 3 quarters and finishing second in the CUSA West division got us more attention than we have had around Denton since 2004...

It has always amazed me that we can get big crowds to games outside of Denton, for football and basketball, than we can expect to get at home. People made it to the Cotton Bowl, or to New Orleans, or to OKC, for bowl games and tournament games that probably couldn't find the Super Pit or Apogee in Denton. UNT playing UNLV in a bowl game in Dallas probably got 20k more people than when UNT played UNLV at Fouts back in 1999...

Its always talk when you hear kids say this... Everyone has a price or a favorite...this kid just found a name that is higher on the college football foodchain that wants him. If a kid had an offer from SFA, Texas State, and NMSU, then got one from us, I suspect that would probably influence that recruit considerably to look at committing to UNT.

I actually think if he chooses Northwestern, that it would make a lot of sense, just because of the academic prestige and the Big Ten competition. Kids want to play at these AQ league schools. Theyalmost always get the best support, facilities, and media coverage. Pat Fitzgerald is a good coach...

ULL and Arkansas State are the only two SBC schools I'd like to see ever get mentioned for CUSA membership down the road. ULL, in particular, would be a nice replacement for Toolame. I hope Tulsa, Tulane, and SMU fail miserably in the Allover America Conference...

To me, recruiting at our level (outside of the top 40 programs in the country) is completely dependent on development. A coach like McCarney knows how to steadily develop a player, particularly a lineman, through strength and conditioning and through solid coaching. Patterson at TCU has done a fantastic job of this, too, up to the point where they now get higher rated classes. Interestingly, TCU's success in recruiting has been inversely related to their on-field performance--of course, the MWC vs the Big XII has a lot to do with that, too!! What we realize now is that Coach Mac just needs to get guys here that want to get better. If he gets that mindset here, there is a great chance that he will become a solid contributor, regardless of ranking. Its so different from the UT Recruiting rags in this state that have overrated any kid that Texas recruits because "they must be great to get UTs attention". That mentality has lead to entitlement and comfortabiility in Club-Med Austin, which eventually led to the fall backwards. Charlie Strong will have to get rid of that mentality to get UT back up to the top of the Big XII, but most likely, he will try to do just that with a lot of players that are overrated because UT Recruiting Rag Authors have gotten paid for their "content", meaning that they sold their readers what they want to read.

Mattress Mac just went way up in my opinion...only way he could be better is if he built his empire in the mean, racist suburbs of north Ft. Worth.

This is so spot-on, its not even funny. That school gets decent talent to go there because its in the big league of the state. But it will never get the talent out there to compete with the recruiting advantages of the other schools. They fired their one advantage they ever had--although I agree completely that Leach was a buttclown. He was an offensive genius and had developed a great reputation for offensive talent to go there. Now, they are left to throwing a Hail Mary pass in hiring Coach Bro to see if he can hack it as a head coach. As I said when tech hired him, it just reeked of desperation, both to reconnect the Leach backers to the university again and to hire someone who wants to be a head coach in Lubbock, Texas. Tommy Tuberville, a coach who was a great SEC coach in Auburn, realilzed quickly that he couldn't get talent out west to play defense the way he coached it, hated Lubbock so much that he left recruits behind at a dinner to leave for the airport to become the head coach at f'ing Cincinatti, leaving an AQ conference for a school that isn't in the AQ leagues anymore. That should tell you all you need to know about that place, not to mention that they house the worst fans in the big 12, according to a poll done a couple of years ago by the players in the league. They are a team that builds its record up on wins over bad teams, beats one good team each year, then gets absolutely seal-clubbed by every other good team on their schedule (see TT football results since 2002). I am jealous, though, that they got political favor with Texas--they have a great future ahead of them only because of UT. If UT goes west one day, almost certainly Tech will get to follow them, even though the Pac-12 wouldn't even consider them without Texas. The Big Ten already told texas that they have a "Tech problem" via an email between the B1G commissioner and UT's leadership, so that won't happen for them, but I think UT only drops Tech if they go independent, which they would do only to eventually go into the Big Ten a few years later. The leadership in Lubbock knows this, so we should all continue to expect more appreciation for all things Burnt Orange from those clowns in Lubbock. I cannot believe that the University of Texas finds themselves partnered up closer with Texas Tech than Texas A&M now. From academics to athletics, the Aggies and the Longhorns are much closer to each other than Tech will ever be. It is just another reminder of how politics really does make strange bedfellows...

PMG, I feel very much the same about UTSA. They have had a very impressive amount of support so far from the citizens of San Antonio. That is a huge and untapped market that wants a team to attach itself to. Its a destination city and has a huge stadium to host big teams and have connections with for bowl representation. UTSA has a lot of advantages, too, from a media standpoint, as they don't share their market with anyone else. Sure, Texas, A&M, and Tech have a ton of representation there, but they have that everywhere in this state. Houston is split between UH and Rice, and DFW is split up between SMU, TCU, and us. UTSA won't have that as a problem. I think what we have done here under McCarney has been absolutely what I thought we would do when we hired him. Get things rolling back in the right direction and make a huge improvement by Year 3. I expect that to continue. And I think he will be here for another 5+ years if he wants to be here. But I also think we will have to realize that UTSA just doesn't have to overcome nearly as much stuff as UNT does with its alumni and community. The Dallas bowl game was incredible--and I hope it lights fire in the DFW alumni base to follow us and support us more in the years to come. But I don't think that it will open any other conference opportunities that are higher up the ladder than what we have today because of the TV market issue, which is bigger than ever now. Schools like us, Texas State, and New Mexico State are stuck on the outside of the conferences that want exposure in those areas. The Big XII, the AAC, and eventually the MWC, will have the TV markets in the state that they want. I could still see a situation where the MWC expands by adding back BYU and getting three Texas teams to join in UH, UTEP, and UTSA. If that happens, I could easily see the AAC adding Rice to replace UH to join their private buddies in SMU, Tulsa, and Tulane again. This is all why I have just learned to enjoy a season like we just saw and hope that we can build on it enough to see more like them in the future. I think we are fine where we are anyway, and even if UTSA and UTEP eventually go to the MWC, for example, we would just replace them with Texas State and one of the following Belt teams (NMSU, ULL, or Arkansas State), which wouldn't be great, but it beats the hell out of what we had before.

1977 and 1978 were probably better than this one, but its real close. IN 2002, we went 8-5, beating Cincy in the NO Bowl, losing to Texas, Alabama, TCU, Arizona, and South Florida In 2003, we went 9-4, losing to Memphis in the NO Bowl, losing to Oklahoma, Air Force, Arkansas, and Memphis. IN 2004, we went 7-5, losing to Texas, Florida Atlantic, Colorado, Baylor, and Southern Miss. In every one of the years above, we beat Arkansas State, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana-Lafayette, Idaho, Utah State, New Mexico State, Middle Tennessee State, and Troy whenever we played them, going 21-0 against the SBC teams of that time. We also beat Nicholls State, Cincy, and Baylor. This past year, had wins over Ball State and Rice, both of whom were better than anyone we beat in those years, except for Cincinatti in the bowl game. That's why it was real close to being up there as our best year ever.

Can we all agree that this is probably the new low point for UNT Basketball? I'm probably alone on this, but I give the blame to RV for this catastrophe. We don't even run into this situation if he doesn't hire a "recruiter" for his first head coaching gig, which he has shown to be woefully unprepared for in every way, which now includes failing at dumbing down the schedule. Fran Fraschilla. Danny Kaspar. Bob Marlin. Scott Cross. All were available to bring here for the job with the most talented team in school history. And we hired Tony Benford, because he could recruit, i.e., BS people to follow him. He must have had one helluva binder in his interview with RV...And even if Benford had been what RV thought he would be as a coach, there is exactly zero doubt that he would've been Tech's coach right now, instead of Tubby Smith. At no other school in America would the AD survive something like this situation with Benford, especially on the heels of the Dodge hire in football and the Stephens hire in womens hoops. RV owns the worst three hires in the school's history in all three revenue sports. Its unreal to me that he keeps his job, much less getting any kind of extension.

What a waste Berglund has become since his Senior Year in HS...

I miss LoveMG's hard-hitting and positive posts...something like this: "We suck at life" That dude may have had a heart attack from reading Andrew/Skiver's eternal optimist posts.

This. UTA has to be enjoying this immensely. UNT90's bet against KRAM on 10 wins this season just got a lot of help...we are gonna be back to 8 wins, with two of those over those non-D1 giants, Northwood and Wayland Baptist. I still like Kram's odds, but it really won't surprise me if UNT90 wins this thing...and I cannot imagine how crazy UNT90 will be when Benford is back as the head coach for 2014-2015.

Literally, he's the worst poster on this website--and its not even close...I'm glad TFLF seems to have him on the ignore list. I encourage others to do it, as well.

Thanks!!

I'd be all for leaving FBS if we have to start paying players stipends. A scholarship at a university is huge--its to help them get a degree while playing a sport they love. We aren't a minor league team for the NFL. Sure, most AQ powers are just that, but we aren't. I love the game of college football, but I hate the powers that rule college football. Its the most self-serving bunch in the history of sports.