UNTDoubleAlum

I always kinda wonder...what other ways do people get their names on buildings at their alma mater if they aren’t rich. Like, I want my name on a UNT building, but I’m not a member of the bourgeoisie. If I rescue a bunch of kids from a burning school bus in the name of UNT, will that do it, or is the only recipe cold, hard, cash?

I hope the university uses this as an opportunity to show us that they have zero tolerance for cruelty toward animals and kick him off the team.

I do have a graduate degree from A&M to go along with my two undergrad degrees from UNT. I think A&M has a fantastic game day atmosphere, and Kyle Field is one of college football’s best venues. That being said, I’m pretty excited to go to Kyle Field as the enemy, dressed in green.

After I got my degree, I had to wander in the wilderness of Amarillo and Kansas City, which coincidentally occurred during the Benford era. But living in Denton again has allowed me to make a lot more games now.

Hard for teams to stop you when you’re both good and consistent at the 3 point line. I mean, I know that’s a super obvious basketball statement, but it’s still fun to say about your own team.

15 is a ton, although this season clearly had enough standout moments to fill the list. I’m just gonna go with my top couple. 1. I got to be on the field briefly during a game this year. That had never happened before and was a great memory. 2. Got to hang out with my wife a ton doing one of my favorite activities, watching UNT Football. 3. Managed to go to every UNT home game. This was my first year living in Denton since 2013 and hadn’t been to a home game in years due to living in Amarillo and Kansas City. 4. The North! Texas! cheer at the LA Tech game. Best atmosphere I’ve ever experienced at a college football game, and I’ve been to a lot. 5. Managed to get a couple of friends and family to come to some UNT games, which is usually tough.

I really love everything you said here. I also think that we go about this the wrong way. We see an article from the hated NT Daily and think “Those nerds and their new art building. Leave our stuff alone!” But honestly, they’re right. Colleges have to spend too much on sports because the system perpetuates spending too much on sports. The conversation we should be having is “You’re right. How do we solve this in a way that changes the system so UNT can keep competing at sports?”

Thanks for reading my long post. I agree with you that I want to see UNT compete in the system. I love UNT. I met my wife there. I met a ton of lifelong friends there. I want any of my future kids to go there. I want to go somewhere and be around UNT and a good Football game is the best way to do that. But while I want UNT to succeed in spite of a rigged system, I’d much rather we, as a society, find a way to tear that system down. If we could find a statutory or regulatory way to cap the spending at the top end of the college athletics spectrum, I bet we could save a lot of money in the process.

While I do agree with (likely) almost all of you that this article has some issues, I do think it can serve as a useful starting point for a conversation into what colleges pay into athletics. There’s no getting around paying good money for good facilities. Facilities that players want to play in, facilities that alumni want to come to. If colleges want to spend on better facilities, with a plan to pay them off, it doesn’t vex me much. But even as a big UNT fan, even as a big Football fan, it is often hard to defend a coach’s salary against an actual educator, which is presumably what college is about. The thing is, if you want to change the system, trying to burn it down at UNT isn’t the answer. The system that UNT struggles to compete in, having a good, sustainable sports program, isn’t a system that UNT built. If you think that universities spend too much money on sports (which hey, I’ll even often agree with), you gotta go fight Texas, and Alabama, and every other huge school with that decided to pay their coach multiple millions of dollars, whose boosters and admin know that pouring huge amounts of money into a program will often earn and sustain success. The market was set long before tried to get a seat at the big boy table. If Nick Saban wasn’t paid 11 million dollars (2017), Seth Littrell wouldn’t command 1 million dollars. Like most bad things in college Football (the money, the inequity in potential, the haves and the have-nots) you have to start tearing down at the problem at the top.

In a tragic plot twist, we went from hopes of a bowl I could have had personally attended, to one that I won’t even be able to watch on TV real time because of prior plans. 😑

As someone who just got the 26th off from work against all odds, I’d really like to be rewarded with the First Responder Bowl. Also, something fun about getting on the train in Denton and be able to go all the way to the bowl.

I have degrees from UNT and a degree from A&M. It was a good day.

I really hope so. Having lived in KC for 2.5 years, I’ve done both KU Football and Basketball games. Beautiful school, fantastic town, really involved alumni. I’d really like to see the Jayhawks get back on track Football-wise. Plus they have a fun scoring tradition where they “wave the wheat”, but it kinda just looks like everyone is doing their best inflatable tube man impression, which is a hoot.

Ooof. My soul hurts.

The level of announcer homerism is kinda grating at this point. It might just because I’m grumpy, I guess.

I met her cause she worked at UNT. I think she’s probably rehabilitated.

My wife’s degree is from UTSA, so I thought this thread was going to be about something different. In her defense, she always tells me her last act as a student was to vote down UTSA forming a Div 1 Football team to begin with.

Wowza. It was really hard for me to stay involved in 2014-2015 and be exposed to the 2015 team, having moved away from Denton and UNT not being super worthy of tv coverage those years.

I’ve always been morbidly curious about how bad that 2008 team was. That was my sophomore year at college (although first year at UNT due to community college/Iraq), so I went to most of the home games, and remember thinking that, in person, they looked like an all-time bad Football team. Do any of the College Football gurus on here have any stats/theories/opinions on how that year’s team stacked up with other really bad teams through Division 1 CF history?

I probably won’t be able to stop myself feeling sorry for them. I suffer from this human flaw called “empathy”. Beat them by a good margin, then call in the backups, and breeze into the finish. If that wasn’t something that 2008 Rice would have done for us, it really doesn’t matter. We can’t control what other people do. We can only control what we do.

During my years actually going to UNT, we were baaaaaaad, and I always had to watch a Power 5 team pay us a million dollars to go get beat up on. It made me feel cheap about my school. I understand there are some benefits to a school that needs program money, but I hate the practice. I hate the pretentiousness of the Power 5, I hate how they make all of College Football’s decisions with no input from the G5, and I hate how they just waggle money in front of “smaller” programs to pump up their fans by stomping up and down on our necks. So, going to a Power school this year and embarrassing them in front of their own fans, and the running off with their money. I wouldn’t trade that for almost anything. I’m much less unhappy about losing to a good UAB program which the Alabama regents tried to kill, and failed, in another show of Power 5 favoritism. I love beating SMU, and I always will. I’d like to have those conference wins, and I’m really going to enjoy (one day) UNT being conference champions. But the highlight of my year was plucky UNT smacking a power school (and the screwed up system that perpetrates it) down in their own house, then getting handed a check for it.

Seems like a pretty innocuous quote to be so salty about. Bussey’s comments were confident without being disrespectful or too pointed. Pretty much what we all want to hear from our sports teams.

On the subject of Denton buy-in, we should offer a discounted ticket to TWU students/staff in the name of Denton unity. They don’t have an equivalent program, there’s clearly no conflict of interest in coming out and supporting our team in the name of Denton when it doesn’t undermine support for their own team/school. We see it all the time in pro sports, where the baseball team will promote the same town’s Football team, or vice versa.

I 100 % agree, but I also would tell you that Denton’s is night and day from my first year at UNT (2008). We definitely want the level of buy-in from Denton that TCU gets from Fort Worth tho. Hell, I moved away from Denton in 2014, and back this year, and the level of investment Denton has in UNT is pretty striking even from then, and that was in the off-season after the 2013 bowl win. If we have a consistently winning program, Denton will continue to line up behind UNT.

You’re right. I don’t think the buy-in is ridiculous, or out of reach for even an average UNT fan. But I’d rather our stadium feel like a communal coming together of UNT fans of all stripes, rather than making our seating into an even more stratified thing. For me, all of this comes from how I feel about my other alma mater, Texas A&M. Everything feels really corporate recently, and I don’t like the feel of it.