That's one of the main reasons for including them, but astro wants to ignore it.
SMU TO THE ACC STARTING 2024-25
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It’s mostly because there are quite a few dog crap basketball schools in the ACC. Not because Army is particularly appealing.
Having been in a conference with an academy for years now, we all know that the enlisted + veteran fan base, while it does provide a slight bump, doesn’t provide a significant one.
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I am basing my argument off of living in the DFW for the past 23 years and seeing UNT's rise in student body population and alumni that remain in the DFW area. Also, while SMU clearly has the riches of donations, UNT receives equal media coverage to SMU, however neither gets the covrage of TCU. As of Fall 2002 census numbers, UNT is the 4th largest university by enrollment (45k) in Texas, just behind UH.
I do agree interest in UNT football historically has been dependent upon their competitiveness like most programs in the G5. Just like TU, UNT has struggled with marketing and promotion. Over the past few years UNT has gone head to head with Tech as the go to university for students in the North Texas area who do not get accepted into A&M or UT. UNT has also started expanding their campus out of Denton, building a campus in Frisco. IMO, if UNT takes that same aggressive approach into developing their athletics the will tap into unrealized potential.
Another point I can make is the fact Aresco went off script when adding UNT, the only time he and/or ESPN added a school who shares a market with an existing member. Now a point could be made that Aresco and/or ESPN made the move as an insurance policy against SMU leaving the conference, but if that's the case why not wait for SMU to move on before back filling the DFW market with UNT? IMO, Aresco and ESPN understood UNT's value to the DFW market thus the move was made while SMU was still a member.
IMO, UNT is a good fit for the American with much in common with exciting members, and I believe UNT will hang around the top 1/2 of the league in average attendance and market viewership for football and basketball with greater potential as they continue to invest in their athletic department.
TX
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Keep working to prove any point that advances the point you hold because someone disagrees. I'm sure you can come up with another one, if he retorts back.
A contrarion argument if I ever heard one.
Something that can be said of any conference with varying degrees of verisimilitude, depending on the quality of the conference.
Georgia Tech/BC/Syracuse/Louisville
Northwestern/Nebraska /Rutgers/Indiana
PS, none of those schools(GT,BC,SU, etc) are considering entering the conference, or ever would. So why are you comparing them to Army. Becuz there is someone arguing with you.
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These things take years to work out. It isn’t a leap to conclude a conference based in part on cheap commercial airfare would learn of schools in DFW and Houston being interested in leaving and lining more schools in the same city to join years in advance.
I would hope the conference, and it's administration would be that forward thinking. If they weren't considering that in their addressing of directions to expand, it would be a rather ignorant stance.
Our daughter attended UNT beginning in 2005. Parents weekend was 9/17/2005 and we attended the Tulsa - UNT game (which TU won 54-2). She never attended another game after that in the four years she was there.
At that time, they had about 35,000 students.
As a displaced Tulsa fan, I'm glad UNT is in the conference. Gives me a chance to go watch a game in a recently renovated stadium with easy access and ample parking. SMU is a nightmare to get to (Mockingbird lane is a parking lot) and they gouge you on parking since there's none to be had. Without UNT, the next closest venue for DFW residents would be Rice, and given the distance, I'd sooner make the drive back up to good ol' Tulsa and admire the campus.
I remember that game. UNT was soo bad
Yep. Nobody talked about the game afterwards. Nothing to say. All the Game Thoughts were just creepers talking about the UNT coeds.
Call Barrister a “creeper” again and you and I are going to have a problem.
Its fitting that SMU joins the ACC in 2024 and their game vs Oklahoma is in Norman... .. 2024 is the 40th anniversary of NCAA vs U of O Board of Regents... the decision that gave us this sh!t-mess.
Ha! The guilty have their right to remain silent.
There are 125 d1 football teams. Reduce it to 120.
Create 12, geographic and tradition conferences with 10 teams each.
Play 9 conference amd 3 non-conference.
No conference championship game, just a playoff with 48 teams.
Create 12, geographic and tradition conferences with 10 teams each.
Play 9 conference amd 3 non-conference.
No conference championship game, just a playoff with 48 teams.
You didn't include byes in your suggestion. 48 teams reduces down to 3 teams. You need byes to make that work.
And now back to reality.
Yea, well,
That was highlight for the group I was with. LOL!
I enjoyed their stadium at the time and the game was well attended. It was a bitt kicking though.
I coached my son’s elementary team that Saturday morning. On the way home from his game, we made a last minute decision to make a road trip to Denton, Texas. It was his first TU football road trip. It was a fun day/evening!
It was supposed to be a pretty close game, but it ended up being Kragthorpe’s TU coming out party! That 54-2 game signaled the beginning of a very good era of TU football!
It was supposed to be a pretty close game, but it ended up being Kragthorpe’s TU coming out party! That 54-2 game signaled the beginning of a very good era of TU football!
I also made an impromptu road trip for that game with my dad. We showed up late and the score was 5-2 and we were very, very confused at first. Great game
That game was a blast for me. I randomly ran into a HS buddy of mine who was at UNT (but I didn’t know it) and after tailgating all day I ran into Moton Hopkins’ parents as we were all heading into the game. I remember talking to them about how great of a guy he is and realized it was a weird conversation because I was talking to them like I was their age and not Moton’s age.
Where do you think I gave up? Fist step to change is to look in the mirror and face your issues. That is not backwards or wishful thinking about a future that hasn't been earned yet. This is reality, and Tulsa is facing a tough road.
I was there when Tulsa was close, when it was competitive in football and basketball. I had my season tickets and gave to the GHC. I sat out in the snow when we got the second chance against Southern Miss, I was there when Chris Penn got lose against Texas A&M. I was in Shreveport on a night so cold even the Oreagon Ducks were complaining. I was there when the Renolds was so loud against UTEP that I lost my hearing for an hour. I was there in Austin when we got screwed by the refs against North Carolina. I've seen TU play in Hawaii for football and basketball. I was the only TU fan in Rhode Island the year we almost made the Final Four. Hell, I've seen us play football in TOLEDO, OH.
So go-ahead and pop your mouth off about someone you know nothing about giving up. It shows who you truly are.
The problem is not the President changing every few years. With the exception of the ill advised elevation of the professor of urinary irrigation, TU has changed Presidents at roughly the same clip as most schools. One capital campaign or four years, which ever comes first and usually end about the same time. That’s typical in the academy. And for good reason, you want the Board setting strategy and the President carrying it out. The longer the tenure of the President, the more likely they run the show, not the Board. At places like SMU, where billionaires routinely show up personally to board meetings, that’s not a problem. But TU doesn’t select its Board members that way.
The problem has been, and continues to be, but it’s much less a problem than even five years ago, there is a confluence of interests on the Board of Trustees of community partners. We need those relationships, but they do not always align with each other and they don’t always get along personally. That results in strained communication and disjointed, even self defeating, efforts towards laudable but often overlapping goals. That’s how you get ridiculous strategic plans that Presidents are told to implement where we are supposedly simultaneously going to become smaller by becoming more selective, while growing the amount of money collected from the student body while leading the nation in average aid award to each student. We are going to raise the overall retention rate to improve our financial position, but not require test scores and admit large numbers of local community college graduates with average grades, etc. to become a more integrated community partner. Etc.
One of the reasons TU got into accreditation trouble, now long gone, is that the Board was too big and had difficulty working together. That led to turnover at the VP and Dean level, the people that have to make sense of Board strategy and implement it. That was problematic from a compliance and institutional control perspective. The Board is now smaller and despite a revolving door at the Dean level, the administration is stabilizing and unifying around principles of financial accountability.
TU’s main challenge is that it aspires to be a national university. But the “norms” of most national universities is a perverse twisted view of reality/markets where government largesse will solve the problem if something is required beyond ignoring the problem or arguing about it for literally decades. TU is in the real world, spending real money, whose value declines due to inflation each day.
In the 1990’s TU brought in a core group of faculty with academic qualifications from the Ivy League or similar. This was viewed at the time as the best path to national recognition for what was already a damn good school. You could get an Ivy education ant TU, but not the recognition because our faculty mostly lacked the magical invented imprimatur of elite academics. Over time, they forced changes on TU that ignored basic market realities and fundamental business concepts that all private enterprise, even non-profits like TU, must absolutely respect. They were able to do that because of the large, disjointed nature of our Board of Trustees, many of whom were willing, if not eager, to turn over decisions to the “experts” on faculty.
The result was a series of decisions, many related to pay, benefits, and travel, that were not instantly catastrophic but over time have weighed the school down and for a time were drowning us. For instance, an institutional commitment to giving some of the same benefits faculty enjoy to all university employees. But those benefits were/are platinum plated to attract people from Harvard to join the faculty in the middle of the country at a lesser school, not attract people working in the lunch room at Union high school to drive north and only swipe ID cards at the dining hall. Or unwritten rules like unlimited vacation/sick days. The result was TU became the place you got a job if you were chronically ill, under insured, and had a friend on campus that could get you hired. To get the work done, we often had to hire two people to do one job but the price tag for that nonsense was often far less than the benefits hit. We won’t talk numbers but rest assured faculty complaining about the pause in their pensions get quiet real quick when they see what their insurance plan has actually cost TU over the years, the amount it contributes today to people who haven’t worked at TU in decades, a comparison of what employees pay out of pocket versus what faculty at peer institutions pay, and who peer schools cover and who they don’t.
It’s changing for new hires in some cases. The good news is that the current leadership appears to see the full picture and has the experience and gravitas to effect real change.
But the big problems you saw at TU a few years ago and the issues that reoccur over the decades at TU typically aren’t caused by Presidential decision making, even if their name was Clancy or Levit. They were caused by catastrophic but incremental decisions, typically at the behest of the continual grousing of the faculty, that ignored market realities, or too difficult to adapt to changing market conditions. Instead of actually doing something about absurd insurance costs, it was too easy to say we will just admit a bunch of unqualified kids and charge them/federal government for housing to pay for our gold gilded insurance plans, etc. And when that didn’t work they just took out short term debt to further avoid the problem and call themselves a success.
It’s those year to year, mounting costs, like benefits, that weighed down the budget and robbed the school of cash flow and flexibility to respond to larger challenges, financing fundraising efforts, or kickstart building things our peers and competitors enjoy, like a real student union, integrated dorms, or an IPF. And eventually the can was kicked enough times it landed on the edge of the cliff, at least in terms of short term financing, and we were/are 30 years behind on what we should have been doing all along.
The good news is, we finally have adults in charge who see the problems and know how to fix them. And aren’t afraid.
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REO Speedwagon was outstanding at River Spirit last night. Back on the Road Again live is worth the price of admission alone.
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I don’t care how old you are, everyone should see Ridin’ The Storm Out live once in their life.
Gotta admit I love REO. I used to see them at Driller Stadium, worked at the stadium and walked over for the annual show.
Driller Stadium was so much fun to go to as a kid. I ended up with a baseball bat, glove, ball AND a plastic batters helmet from only having gone to maybe 20 games in my life. Big splash was right up the street if you wanted a fresh case of pinkeye, and bells was close by too... Ah, the good ol' days...
From the outside, it definitely at times has seemed that there were people involved who weren't concerned about TU except as it could help them achieve their other goals, so TU was a means for them and not an end. Usually if you have a board that wants to micromanage, they pick crappy, weak presidents/CEOs since good leaders would not stand for that (and no good president would accept the job). We seem to be out of that model, at least for now.
I was there the day it collapsed. I remember some of the Major League players carrying the injured to the waiting ambulances.
That was past my baseball watching days. Terrible thing.
I do have two autographed baseballs from the Oilers circa mid 1970s. I don't think his autograph is there but the main player I remember from those days is Keith Hernandez.
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A visiting player tossed me a ball after a game the season before the collapse. It is the only baseball I have ever got at a game and turned out to be from the game winning hit at the Oilers final home win.
Wow, that’s a long response, with a long list of old initiatives! I would bet that many of these initiatives were proposed by various presidents.
Regardless, however someone wants to frame the source of TU’s problems, frequent changes in university focus and priorities have been detrimental. This is especially true in regards to TU athletics. These changes of direction have severely hampered TU football and basketball for decades.
You can place the blame with the board of trustees, & yes they are responsible for the hiring of the president. I believe the President sets the tone that university employees, local media and fans follow. When the President shows a sincere & visible interest in TU athletics, it changes things.
For me, the bottom line is this: If/when TU CONSISTENTLY shows a desire to compete in major college sports, TU will be successful! I hope the Carson tenure is the beginning of a consistent focus on athletic excellence at TU!
The Board delegates the management and promotion of university athletics to the President.
What you see and hear from Carson has the value added of his natural skill as a communicator and native Tulsan. But make no mistake, the messages he conveys are wholly the policies and parameters set by the officers and Board, to whom he reports. Including what you refer to as the “tone” around athletics.
What you see and hear from Carson has the value added of his natural skill as a communicator and native Tulsan. But make no mistake, the messages he conveys are wholly the policies and parameters set by the officers and Board, to whom he reports. Including what you refer to as the “tone” around athletics.
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