Modern History
Though coach Hayden Fry left the school in 1978 with a 9-3 season, he also left it with a mounting athletics debt. The team was subsequently demoted to Division I-AA status by the NCAA. In 1982, the university recognized that the athletics program had a deficit of $1.6 million and voted to join the Southland Conference. The program experienced little success in subsequent years, but in 1995, a coordinated campaign by donors to purchase large blocks of seats at Fouts Field spiked the average attendance enough for the school to enter Division I-A once again in 1995.
After the school joined the Sun Belt Conference in 2001, Darrell Dickey briefly revived fortunes in Denton, winning four straight conference championships. The team played in the 2001 New Orleans Bowl despite having a losing record. After he went 2-9 and 3-9 in his eighth and ninth seasons, the athletic department fired Dickey on November 8, 2006.
The school then hired Todd Dodge, who had been offensive coordinator at UNT from 1991-1992, on December 12, 2006. Dodge had been one of the nation’s most successful high school football coaches, amassing a 98-11 record overall at Carroll High School in Southlake, Texas, including a 79-1 record over his last 5 years. His teams at UNT struggled to win, however, compiling a 6-37 record overall and a 3-23 record in conference play. After a 1-6 start to the 2010 season, the school fired Dodge. He was replaced by offensive coordinator Mike Canales as interim head coach. In 2011, the university hired Dan McCarney as head coach.
On May 4, 2012, the school held a press conference announcing that they had accepted an invitation to join Conference USA beginning in the 2013 season. Florida International University, Louisiana Tech University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the University of Texas at San Antonio will begin play in Conference USA in 2013 as well, bringing the conference to 13 members.
Read more about this topic: North Texas Mean Green Football
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or history:
“The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or pure silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)