(10-14-2015 07:36 AM)runamuck Wrote: (10-13-2015 07:52 PM)FoUTASportscaster Wrote: (10-13-2015 08:45 AM)arkstfan Wrote: (10-11-2015 11:37 AM)runamuck Wrote: (10-11-2015 09:47 AM)ButlerGSU Wrote: UNT has been trying to shake that commuter school mentality for years but just can't seem to do it. A majority of their students feed in from the 50+ community colleges in the DFW area so they just don't have the 'Mean Green' pride and I think that really hurts their athletic success. I know, I know...they had success but they haven't in the past few years...just seem to be going from bad to worse.
They have a beautiful stadium, nice campus and are in a great area but just can't get over the hump.
they are not so much a commuter school as they are a school with a student body that is not very gung ho on sports. the school is mostly liberal arts and so is the student body. they have struggled for years to be considered one of the "big boys" they have just not been able to put all the pieces in place. moving to the cusa has given them somewhat of a boost because they now have a few better known peers such as rice and utep and somiss etc. but they havent been able to translate that into onfield success.
There is a lot of unrealized potential there. Joe Sixpack driving a dump truck for the highway department isn't likely to ever embrace SMU or TCU. He's going to love his Cowboys and either TAMU or UT (probably UT) but UNT can get him to buy a ticket if there is a winning team in a nice stadium. So far they've had winning team + dump and terrible team + palace.
A great deal of the blame at UNT goes to the rank and file fan. Years were wasted pissing and moaning about conference affiliation rather than demanding the infrastructure be improved and the product on the field improved.
That creates the perfect scenario for mediocrity because then you don't own your failures. It all gets pinned on something you cannot control.
The trick for a suburban school in a big metro like UNT and UTA is to get two things, the students and alumni to buy in and to get the community on board.
I know that UNT has tried to some degree with the first, but have no clue as to the second. My guess, looking at the results in the stands is they are struggling on both. A winning product helps, but if you get the proper buy in from the proper groups, it doesn't matter as much.
UTA has been successful at both. College Park Center helped, but we've been investing in the Arlington community and outreaching to the UTA groups. Attendance in both basketballs and volleyball have more than doubled (almost tripled in men's basketball) and has increased by about 50% in baseball.
It seems UNT did the old Mavericks strategy of building a new stadium and say come on in. Our program was pulled in six years cause of the effort we put in.
someone mentioned utsa and txst having the president and admin. on board for improving athletics, but a main reason for that is not that they are big on sports but that they, like uta, are in a drive for tier one status and one cant be considered tier one if one's peer schools are small regional schools with limited academic standing like the bulk of the slc schools. we all had to move away from them and find a better group of schools to pair with. that meant a step up in athletics as well and new schools to try and develop rivalries with. utsa and txst being the only game in town are at a little of an advantage over metro area schools like untexas and uta and gastate where there is a lot of other stuff to compete with to get the fans to come out and have to work hard to make that happen.
you make some good points, but it was not just about "tier 1" (or NRUF Fund participation as it should be called since "tier 1" has become even more meaningless than it already was)
but both schools also had "timing" to deal with.....the president of UTSA has been there a long long time already and never made a move on athletics, but the timing and situation was never right for them to do so in a meaningful way.
There was talk of NFL teams, USFL, (whatever other failed leagues) all looking at the SA market. SA for a long long time while a large city was not all that well off and did not have a core group of industries outside of military which many are probably sports fans to a degree many already have other teams to pull for and they are highly mobile as well....they move in....they move away (with the exception of the retired)
I have never felt (some may disagree) that UT Austin has ever stood in the way of the ambitions of other campuses, but the UT System is a well run system and they do not allow their member universities to go off half cocked on stupid little projects that are not going to deliver concrete results. And UTSA adding football and not fast tracking to D1-A and at least being semi-successful (I think they have already exceeded ALL expectations) would be a non-starter.
One also needs to keep in mind there was the NCAA moratorium on new D1-A teams for a number of years as well.
And the real key with UTSA was they were never reaching the status they had been founded to reach and that was to be a major research university for a major city and region. But being the only public school in the city along with several very small private schools UTSA could not slam the door on most students.
With the opening of Texas A&M-San Antonio it is now possible (and they already have) for UTSA to raise admissions while maintaining a size that gives them economies of scale to be able to move towards a larger research profile.
Combine all of this with San Antonio growing, developing things like auto assembly, technology, and more medical related industries and finally leveraging the military into private sector companies and the fans and dollars are there to support a major college team.......especially now that it has become clear that San Antonio is not getting an NFL team anytime soon and if they did so the AlamoDome would not be a proper venue and SA is not looking to build a new venue especially on speculation of getting an NFL team (tried that once before did not work)
So really the NRUF program just happened to fit in at the same time as the other pieces fit in for UTSA
while at Texas State for a number of years they were a school where students went to be close to Austin and UT and a lot of them cheered for UT to some degree and many went to Austin to party most weekends. That ended probably long before most people believe it ended (I think most would say it ended 6-8 years ago when it is more like 12 years ago). Texas State has a solid foundation of academics (better than most would give them credit for by far) and the traffic and difficulty getting to Austin just to "go out" along with the growth of San Marcos in general and Texas State made it a better place to stay and go out. Plus 6th street in Austin is ghetto as hell now and a better place to get in a fight and get stabbed after getting overcharged for drinks and the "clubbing" has spread out to a lot more areas than just 5th or 4th street or over to the warehouses (which are mostly demoed and high rise condos now anyway).....so "going out" in Austin from San Marcos and expecting to bump into a lot of fellow Bob Cats is not really something you can expect to do now like you could 15+ years ago
Then you have the president of Texas State that has since day one seen and understood the idea of "branding" which is why she pretty much immediately pushed through the name change to Texas State from SWT even though there were some that were not happy with it and even though it had failed to happen one time before (in a very weak effort)
That name change really was not all that long ago.....Texas State has seen MAJOR growth in enrollment since then along with degree offerings and even PhDs all of which were designed to move towards a major research university. So she probably always had it in her mind to push athletics and football forward, but she needed the timing to be right, she needed to keep more students around on the weekend, she needed to make the name change stick and PROVE it was beneficial and she needed to square away some academics like adding PhD programs and engineering. Once that was done combined with enrollment growth it was a no brainer to "move the brand forward" with athletics. In the past without a name change, without getting the PhD and engineering programs squared away and without the enrollment it would have been a lot more of a case of Texas State just moving up because everyone else is and probably failing at it like many others do. Now to be clear they need to start mixing in some wins and getting skipped over for a bowl game last year did not help the cause, but they are on a lot better footing than most other schools that have moved up in the recent or even more distant past. Texas state would have never been able to sell a student fee that started at $10 and raised to $20 over 5 years with a student vote to pass it if they had not taken a number of other steps before hand.
Lastly Texas State at the time the NRUF program came out was not even an "Emerging Research University" in Texas and thus they were not eligible to participate in the NRUF or TRIP programs and they were already on "The Drive" to D1-A football (and to emerging research status) before the NRUF and TRIP programs became a reality.....so moving up in football was something they had planned even before any "tier 1" nonsense started.
