Neither one of you have any inkling of understanding the landscape of college sports. For some reason, you (and everyone else that seems to support giving football the ax at XYZ University because they don’t roll in 9-figure profits…) always seem to go to the hiring of Dan McCarney and the building of Apogee and talk about how they have been failures that haven’t changed anything about the financial state of our athletics department. This is so seriously flawed that, honestly, it causes any other argument you make to be entirely moot because you’ve lost any ethos you had going for you when you said this.

Want to see a difference in the financial outlook of the football program? It’s simple. WIN. Winning solves everything. If we were to hypothetically win 10 games each of the next 5 years, Apogee would be sold out every game, and we’d be talking expansion to the stadium.

But…how does one win in college football? Simple. There are two factors: recruiting, and coaching. This is where the hiring of Dan McCarney comes in. He’s an excellent football coach who turned Iowa State from a nobody program (much like UNT) to a well-respected team in a major conference that is a regular participant in bowl games. He’s shown that he can do it, and he’ll do it here too.

Recruiting is tied into coaching, because it’s the coaches that recruit. This is one key because, well, this is how you get players. But, unfortunately, it takes time to do this. Even if you were to pull off a ridiculous recruiting class at the level of an A&M or UT-Austin, these freshmen aren’t going to make an impact immediately that we’ll see in the W/L columns. And that type of recruiting class is incredibly unrealistic to shoot for here at UNT anyways. McCarney has done an excellent job of recruiting, and finally, this season, we’ll have some of his recruits entering their second year of having substantial playing time. But the majority of this team is still made up of players from the previous coaching regime, who was without argument the worst football coach in the history of this state, let alone university. McCarney picked up an empty program and has won 9 games in two seasons, compared to the previous coaches grand total of 6 wins in 43 games.

This whole process takes an incredible amount of time. Apogee boosts student pride and attendance, and you can see that when you look at student attendance figures from pre-2011 and compare it to the 2011 and 2012 seasons. Apogee helps recruiting in ways you can never even imagine, because Fouts is a DUMP that no 18 year old who is a superstar in his own mind will want to play at (nevermind its total electrical inefficiency…), and Apogee is a state-of-the-art, beautiful stadium that you should be PROUD of, not looking at as a mistake. The building of Apogee wasn’t a magic cure-all that would infuse UNT’s football roster with All-Americans, however, like you seem to have expected it to be.

The move to C-USA is also not a status quo move. There are two important things to look at with this move. One: We escaped the sinking ship that is the Sun Belt before it actually sinks. Two: C-USA has a much higher shared revenue agreement and makes much more money off of TV deals….and we also get 3 in-state rivals as opposed to the ZERO we had in the Sun Belt (we also keep our footprint in Louisiana, and add an Oklahoma rival). This will drive attendance wayyyy up.

Give McCarney time. Give Apogee time. Two years is not enough to see a financial change. You’ll see that change in a few years when we’re winning C-USA championships and are regularly flirting with the AP top 25 poll, because that’s when we’ll be selling out Apogee on a regular basis.

PS: We’re in line for another nationally televised home game this year. I don’t think that would’ve ever happened at Apogee. National TV=major exposure=$$$$$$$ for your pretty little journalism degree.

Hope you can finish out the season strong.

Team Ball – and Plays in the Paint wins big games -

Go Lady Eagles -

http://i48.tinypic.com/29v1b4k.jpg

Classy lady indeed!

No specifics? Some of these comments ask very specific questions that highlight the flawed logic behind Will’s entire premise. This article is what happens when pseudo-intellectual ‘journalism’ majors take a stab at governmental accounting.