Putting the new C-USA in a UNT historical perspective

[Harry]

I went back to the record books to determine the last time North Texas was in a I-A (now FBS) conference with ANY other school in Texas...

Some of the veterans here will know this but it really blew me away....

1974 is the last time North Texas was in a I-A conference with ONE Texas school -- this would have been in the Missouri Valley and the one Texas school we had in that conference was West Texas A&M in Canyon...

38 Years AGO!!! Before many of you were born...

That is a VERY long time to be without one team in your conference from your home state for goodness sakes!!

Now we move up to having 3 I-A conference opponents in Texas cities a little bigger than Canyon...Houston, San Antonio and El Paso.

Anyone who could complain about our move to C-USA evidently isn't taking our history into account.

[Green Crazy]

I don't even understand how that's possible with all the universities in Texas?

[Mean Green 93-98]

We were with Texas schools during the entirety of our 1AA existence, so I don't know that I could really think of it that way. But it has been a while since we went 1A and left behind our associations with Texas schools.

[JesseMartin]

Well, yeah, there are a ton of schools, about 3 dozen state schools and a ton of private ones, not all of which have football teams...but aside from the recent additions, I-A has been Tech, UT, aTm, Baylor, TCU, SMU, Rice, UH, UTEP, and us...so 10 schools (now 12), I think. Really, the key here is our time spent in I-AA; we had Texas opponents during that time, and choosing to return to the higher level of competition made it difficult to be choosy about our conference. So really the main period where we should realistically have been in a conference with another Texas opponent would have been 1974-whenever we dropped down to I-AA, so about 10 years. Still, yes, it does seem to show how much we've been pushed out of things by our fellow Texas schools.