chomp

100% this. The easiest place to see this happening is the way that each time the SEC has expanded, it has killed off several major historical rivalries. The last SEC expansion killed Florida's annual rivalry with Auburn, one of our oldest and most competitive rivals. This expansion will no doubt kill others, all in the name of TV marketshare and revenue generation. Coming off a losing season this past year and not a lot of optimism for this coming year's Gator team, that 2024 schedule is going to be a brutal one for a head coach who is likely to be feeling a lot of heat.

In the same way that I couldn't argue with the idea that players should be able to earn whatever they can through NIL, I find it just as hard to argue that players are not employees who should be able to market their services for what the market will pay. Having said that, if players are employees open to the highest bidder with little actual connection to the universities that they play for, what exactly is the point of college athletics? If I'm going to pay to watch a paid employee throw a football or shoot a basketball, why should I choose a college game over a professional game? In the past, I spent my money on college sports because there was at least the illusion that the players from my school attended the same school that I did or were students in the classes that I taught. There was a shared university experience that connected players and alumni across decades. Once that is gone, aren't I just left with paying money to watch someone who just agreed to get paid to wear a particular college jersey?

I’m not sure if there is anything specific in terms of student mental health support that you have in mind, but I know that UNT has put more resources into student mental health in the midst of COVID. It is also very easy for faculty to refer students for help from UNT’s CARE Team, if they see something concerning. I have filed referrals on a number of students who needed help and the CARE Team has been very responsive.

This schedule is great. I have not been this excited about a UNT football schedule in all of my time at the university. Does anyone know why the AAC has not set up the last week of the season to maximize the number of rivalry games? There are several obvious rivalry games (UNT-SMU, UNT-UTSA, UAB-Memphis, etc) and some potential budding rivalries (USF-FAU) that seem like they would be perfect for that last week as rivalry week.

It blows my mind that with all of the enormous strides that this university has made, the programs of national and international stature that it has, and the genuinely excellent students that attend it, the folks that market UNT consistently seem to think that they are trying to market some sort of Carnival cruise.

Wow! This is so exciting! What college football fan hasn't been dreaming of the day when players are paid millions by shadowy groups connected to schools, the players have no real connection or loyalty to the schools that they play for, and we can enjoy compelling league matchups like UCLA-Rutgers and USC-Purdue! While there has always been greed in college football, it is poetic justice that it is the over-the-top greed of the SEC and Big Ten that will kill the game in the end.

Leave it to the UNT System to not be able to actually read the ranking. According to the article, UNT is one of only 2 North Texas schools that rank in the top 10 for the State of Texas. In the ranking, Rice is #1, UT #2, UTD #3, UNT #9.

This thread has some really good discussion. As someone who does work in this area, I should emphasize that the U.S. does not have a missile defense system capable of defending the American homeland from the Russian nuclear arsenal. The U.S. has a very limited capacity system based in CA & AK that might be capable of providing some protection against a very small (single digits) ICBM attack against the U.S., but even there, there is no guarantee. In fact, the one thing that would sharply increase the risk of a Russian nuclear attack against the U.S. would be a Russian belief that the U.S. was soon to implement a missile defense system capable of securing the American homeland against Russia's arsenal. As grim as it sounds, the U.S. and Russia (and, before that, the Soviet Union) have tacitly agreed to hold one another's cities hostage with nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear war. I only mention this because it explains some of the tightrope that the U.S. has attempted to walk in responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Putting the merits of the lawsuit aside, responding to a flyer lying around by writing anonymously on a chalk board "please don’t leave garbage lying around” and then subsequently complaining in a lawsuit that microaggressions "suppresses alternative viewpoints instead of encouraging growth and dialogue" is some A+ level irony.

I still cannot help thinking that the P5 is a bubble just waiting to burst. I don't begrudge players demanding the transfer portal & NIL and the financial rewards that come from it. I also can't gripe about coaches trying to make as much as they can. But, the end result is that for the P5, the connection between players & coaches with their schools is getting weaker and weaker. If the allegiance of players and coaches is only driven by who pays top-dollar & the schools do nothing to create the same educational experience for players that it does for regular students, that means that alums of P5 schools share no connection to the coaches & players from their schools and are doing nothing more than rooting for laundry. I realize that this has always been somewhat the case, but today it is much more explicit. That's why it gets harder and harder for me to care as much as I once did about my own school. This is where I think the G5 has the opportunity to be an alternative where someone playing for your school has actual meaning.

Could not have said it better.

Being an a-hole who wasn’t winning put Mullen in the position to be fired, but the fact that he was getting killed in recruiting made it a lot easier to do it now. I imagine the $12 M he’ll get paid not to coach might help cushion the blow a bit.

While everyone has mentioned UNT’s investment in facilities as key to the AAC invite, I thought that it was interesting to see USF pointing to UNT as an example that it needs to follow. https://www.tampabay.com/sports/bulls/2021/10/22/what-usf-football-can-learn-from-this-round-of-aac-expansion/?fbclid=IwAR1m3AFDlfNTTlrCy0ZZFNplCTSTW9omYuesipNSz6PWapmsdRPizXRVlok

The fact that the first booster to plan to bankroll an entire team is a Miami booster is the world's least surprising development. Part of me is starting wonder if the long-term consequences of this are going to be worse in the end for the P5 than the G5. One of the draws of college football has always been some combo of the tradition coupled with the idea that alumni & students share something in common with the players from our school. I realize that the college experience of most major college football players has always looked a good bit more different than that of an average student, but that gap has been increasing over the years as schools pour more and more money into fancy facilities, transfer rules have loosened, etc. Things like what this Miami booster is doing (and you know boosters elsewhere will do the same) to take advantage of NIL are only going to increase that gap. At some point, I suspect that it is going to get harder and harder for a typical alumnus of a P5 to see any more connection to a football player from their school than they do to the pro football player in the nearest city. I suspect that UNT athletes are pretty representative of other G5 schools. The students that I see in my classes at UNT take similar classes to their peers and seem to have an overall experience at UNT that looks a lot more similar to that of what many non-student athletes at UNT have. Perhaps that will translate into future alumni from schools like UNT caring more and seeing a deeper connection to their student athletes than I think is looming for the P5. Then again, I'm someone who has always enjoyed minor league baseball more than major league, so maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part.

Putting aside the content of the editorial, posts like this on this site puzzle me. What is the point of attacking an undergraduate writing for a student newspaper at your alma mater? How does that help either the student or UNT? There are lots of better targets for criticism in the paid media, why hit a UNT student?

The last word that faculty received last week was that fall enrollment count was up by 2.5% thus far. Student retention is also up considerably. If these numbers hold, what UNT has managed to do in terms of student enrollment in this environment is nothing short of impressive.

I don't see the problem here. ADs have made it abundantly clear how dependent athletic departments are on football revenue and the pandemic threat to the football season has underscored this dependence even more. It only makes sense that players would take that info and use it to press things that they see as important to them. If the players are just students who can be easily replaced by other students and that same football revenue will still be available to colleges & universities, then ADs have nothing to worry about in terms of these demands. If, however, the revenue is because of the skills of those particular players and cannot be easily replaced by other students, then it sounds like colleges & universities are going to need to buck up, bargain with the players, and give some concessions to their demands. That's just the marketplace at work.

No, not adriel. Different type of social scientist!

It thrills me to no end that UNT is doing more and more of these sort of things because these are exactly the traditions that help to build a lifelong connection between alumni and the university. When I first arrived at UNT, students often tended to see it as stopping off point for a few years that created little long-term connection. That has really changed over the last several years and things like this reinforce it.

The advice that I give my students (liberal arts majors), is to focus on developing skills while they are in college rather than just think very narrowly about a particularly job for a specific major (ie; political science=law school, biology=med school, etc.). While most liberal arts degrees don't train students for a specific job, they can prepare students for good jobs - if students focusing on developing marketable skills. A liberal arts student that takes advantage of the opportunities that their courses give them to develop the ability to write well, communicate ideas, and analyze data can do quite well, particularly if that student has also developed some skills along the way in something like statistics, database management, a computer language, etc.

I was walking over there this afternoon and saw a pole that I had not noticed before. Hopefully, this is it. Otherwise, I am incredibly unobservant.

Does anyone know if Apogee Stadium is open to the public during the week? To get some exercise, I've carved out a good 4 mile walk through campus and across the pedestrian bridge over to Apogee Stadium. Now that I'm in a bit better shape, it occurred to me that adding some stadium steps might be something else I could do if it is allowed in Apogee. Thanks!

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. This is really helpful.

My wife and I are bringing her parents to the game on Saturday and we are wondering how crowded the ADA lot near Apogee tends to be. Her father is disabled and has a handicapped placard, but we are trying to decide how quickly the ADA lot nearest Apogee tends to fill up. Thanks for any advice.

This was the first game that I have made it to this season and I have to say, I was really impressed with the student section at last night's game. It was the most involved that I have seen them in a game in a long time. Once we moved from our initial dead stadium section to the student side, it was a lot more fun. Heck, my wife actually wants to go to another game, which is a minor miracle. One minor point that I don't understand, since UNT really wants to draw newcomers to games, why doesn't the display board show the words to the alma mater/fight song when it is being sung? For newbies, you feel kind of like an idiot just standing there, wanting to support the team, but having no idea what the words being sung are. One of the biggest traditions at my alma mater is singing our fight song at the end of the 3rd quarter while the crowd sways. Even though that is an old tradition, the words still are displayed for people to follow along. It seems like a trivial thing, but anything to get people more involved would seem useful.