GJ Winne

Big fan of our throwbacks.

Thanks for the name. Big week for the Bobcats on the recruiting trail - already got 3 former aTm commits as well. Pierce hire is paying off.

Apparently TXST has a commitment from a SS previously committed to Texas. Anyone have a name?

Fuck right off with that nonsense. Why would TXST want to go to a MWC that just lost 5 of their 6 best schools? Go from a very solid and stable conference with 14 teams to a shaky 8 team conference where it's best remaining program is being targeted (AFA) and the others aren't wanted by anyone else? As stated previously: location, location, location. Being the only school in a major media market with a stadium and hotels 10 min from an international airport holds a lot of weight. Having shit leadership the last 20 years didn't help. Posted in the UTSA thread last week:

I'd like to keep my coach for at least another year, please and thank you. Also, fuck Neon and Neon Jr. Hunter is a fucking stud though.

The only way I would have wanted to move would be if we ended up w/ the right combination of teams. I really like the Sun Belt, and not just for football. 12 teams in bowl games last year; Baseball, Softball, Volleyball were all 4 bid NCAAs. Hoops is weak - 1 bid ea for M/W. We are on an island in Texas, but that doesn't bother me as much as it does others. We have UTSA schedule through like 2031 and I'd think that continues in perpetuity.

I don't know about anything official, but the fans certainly talk about it. AFAIK, they get the Alamodome for free, and the dome gets the on-prem revenue (feel free to correct me on that), so I don't know that the school is trying to spend more money there. They do have a nice new athletic training facility on campus: https://goutsa.com/roadrunner-athletics-center-of-excellence The rest of their facilities are ass, my dude. Baseball, softball, basketball, volleyball - all HS level.

SBC! SBC! SBC!

I knew the beeps were soft, considering they need aircon and other teams to get any kind of crowd, but damn! Can't wait to see pics from the dome later today.

Watching beepbeep fans cope w/ damn near the whole team in Austin and Manu firing the cannon was incredibly entertaining this morning.

This was absolutely awesome, btw. Singer from our mariachi band solo'd during a timeout and just CRUSHED the whole time. Towards the end as the teams were coming back onto the field, the production person was trying to usher him off, but dude had his eyes locked on the officials w/ the countdown timer at the other end and belted out his song until that thing hit zero. Dude was straight up money and he had the crowd HYPED as we returned to play.

GJ Kinne continues to build something special in short time at Texas State In between the mascot riding a motorcycle onto the field and a mariachi break sometime during the second half, there was a football game on Thursday night. Texas State lost its first game of the season, falling 31-28 at UFCU Stadium to an Arizona State team that was picked to finish last in its first season in the Big 12, but has won three straight to start the season. It was a battle of the party schools, and it’s clear that, regardless of the result, Texas State head coach GJ Kinne is building something in San Marcos. “The message afterward was just to stay together,” Kinne said. “We’re going to go win a bunch of ballgames.” In less than a year and a half, Kinne has turned Texas State from a laughingstock into a sleeping giant. In three seasons under Everett Withers, the Bobcats failed to win more than three games. That was followed by four years with Jake Savaital as the head coach, where the Bobcats took a small step forward by winning four games in back-to-back seasons, but failed to really break through. Texas State brought in a different kind of coach when they hired Kinne before last season. The son of a former Baylor linebacker and coach built Incarnate Word into the top offensive team in all of college football in his one year in San Antonio. He brought in 49 new players in his first year, about half of which came from the transfer portal, beat Baylor in Waco in his first-ever game and led Texas State to their first bowl game in school history, where it beat Rice in the First Responders Bowl. Thursday night felt like a culmination of everything. With a Power Conference school coming to San Marcos for a standalone Thursday game on national television, the Bobcats didn’t disappoint. Thanks to 268 passing yards and four touchdowns by former Sun Belt Player of the Year quarterback Jordan McCloud, Texas State put up 400 yards of total offense in the loss to Arizona State. The Bobcats built a two-touchdown lead in the first half only to see the Sun Devils storm back with a pair of touchdowns in the final four minutes of the first half to tie things up. McCloud was about to get rocked by an incoming Arizona State defender late in the third quarter but stayed composed in the pocket to throw a 44-yard dime to Jaden Williams and reestablish the Texas State lead. Arizona State forced a pair of fourth-quarter turnovers, and reigning Big 12 Offensive Player of the Week Cam Skattebo rushed for a touchdown and Ian Hershey kicked the game-winning field goal with under three minutes to go. “When a good team like that, a Big 12 team, comes to your house, and you have an opportunity to capitalize, you’ve got to be able to capitalize,” Kinne said. “Most of the time, we’ve done that. We didn’t get it done and it’s just part of football. “We’ll learn from this, we’ll be battle-tested. Sometimes you don’t realize why, but it’ll play itself out.” Texas State has more than a week to figure out what went wrong in the second half on Thursday before taking on Sam Houston in its final non-conference game on Sept. 28 in Houston. Until then, the party in San Marcos rolls on. “I hate it for the kids that we weren’t able to get that win, but I think we earned a lot of respect around the country tonight," Kinne said.

Kinda feel like that's a stamp of approval, given your history.

I have never harbored delusions of grandeur and an undefeated season/playoffs, so I'm not too torn up about last night's L. I got exactly what I needed out of this game: Be in the fight with a P5 late in the game, and show everyone, including ourselves, that we're legit. The W would have been a huge bonus, but in the big picture of the program overall, that singular result isn't as important as the process. My goal for this year has always been a Sun Belt title, and nothing I've seen so far tells me that can't happen. More than anything, I'm incredibly proud of the students for showing up and showing out the last 2 games. They really made a difference in the game, causing false starts, timeouts, etc. Unreal atmosphere that I wasn't sure we'd ever see in SMTX. Seeing students cheer on all 3 downs of defense, get bonkers on 3rd down, quiet each other down of offense - hell, even the alumni side was up and out of their seats the whole game and cheering. 25K+ on a weeknight and 9k+ students at the game? Win right there. This was epic:

It's a huge hit w/ the fans. Everyone wants the Cats shirts the coaches are wearing and I've already seen it on hats being sold.

I know y'all may be referring to it as Kinne's offense because he's the HC and people keep acting like he's the architect, but Mack Leftwich runs the O and calls the plays. Couldn't agree more on the playcalling being less than ideal, and it was like that from the jump - we were behind the chains all night because of limp dick calls on 1st and 2nd down. The late game horizontal calls were GDGD-esque and had me punching air. There is some unreal beauty in our offense when it's playing balls out, but it can't slow down and idle for shit. Grinding out games isn't what we do well, and I think they were trying to pace, knowing ASU can eat clock. I'd rather hang brain and lose going full throttle than trying to do something other than what we do best.

G.J. Kinne has made football Texas State’s biggest attraction since swimming pigs Kinne’s Bobcats have been hogging time on ESPN ever since he arrived last year. Once upon a time, San Marcos’ biggest attraction was Aquarena Springs and its marquee act, Ralph the Swimming Pig. The theme park on the crystal headwaters of the San Marcos River also featured glass-bottom boats, alligators, mermaids and a chicken that took on all comers in tic-tac-toe. But the top dog, or hog, was Ralph, a gen-u-ine even-toed, hoofed mammal who executed his signature “swine dive” into the hearts of children and adults alike. Ralph — or one of his more than 700 understudies — famously warranted segments on Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News and “That’s Incredible!” But when Ralph took his final dip in 1996, he took much of the town’s national interest with him. Until G.J. Kinne showed up at Texas State last year, that is. He’s been hogging time on ESPN ever since. The 2-0 Bobcats’ game Thursday night at UFCU Stadium against Arizona State will be one of four on ESPN this season. Until this year, according to a report in the local paper, the Bobcats had only made ESPN’s primary feed three times in school history. “It’s a testament,” athletic director Don Coryell said over the phone, “to the man sitting here next to me.” The man, of course, is Kinne, who kick-started his tenure last year with a 42-31 road upset of Baylor, a four-touchdown favorite, and didn’t stop until he’d led the Bobcats to a win over Rice in Frisco’s First Responder Bowl. Only one year into the job, and he’d already made history. Before he left Incarnate Word for Texas State, Kinne had no idea the Bobcats had never been bowling. “Damn,” he said Tuesday, “I probably should have asked that before I came.” Kinne has shaken up things on a campus long known across the state for shaking. The university hardly shies from the reputation. On its official bio of Boko the Bobcat, the school mascot, his fields of study include “partyology.” Considering Arizona State makes national lists of schools known for a good time, Thursday’s game seems like a natural match. “The more I think about it,” tweeted Andy Staples, national college football writer for On3.com, “the more excited I get about the Party School Bowl on Thursday in San Marcos.” The fact that the Sun Devils will even be on hand in San Marcos is a novelty as rare as swimming pigs. Most FBS schools — certainly those from power conferences — are only too happy to include Sun Belt inventory and the like for nonthreatening nonconference games. Occasionally big-time schools will sign a two-for-one deal, meaning two games at their place for one on a Group of Five campus. Until this season, the only power conference schools to play in San Marcos were Texas Tech in 2012 (a 58-10 blowout of the locals) and Baylor in ‘21 (a 29-20 heart-stopping win for the Bears). Coryell — who’s been at Texas State for 21 years, the last four as athletic director and is not related to the Hall of Fame coach — doesn’t know why Arizona State agreed to a home-and-home in 2015. There were no stipulations, as far as he knew. Maybe it was because the Sun Devils were on their way from six wins in ‘15 to five in ‘16. The Bobcats had only been an FBS school for a couple of years. Maybe they seemed like the perfect patsies. Back when it was known as Southwest Texas State, the school that also gave us a president (Lyndon Johnson) and a king (George Strait) won back-to-back national titles under Jim Wacker in 1981-82. But that was NCAA D-II. Until Kinne’s eight wins last year, the Bobcats had had more head coaches (Dennis Franchione, Everett Withers and Jake Spavital) than winning seasons (one) since moving up in class in 2012. What Coryell saw in Kinne, the third-youngest FBS coach when he was hired at 34, was someone who’d gone 12-2 in his first season at Incarnate Word and led the nation in points (51.5) and yards (581.2) per game. He also liked the experience the Mesquite native had accumulated in an eventful, peripatetic life. From the time he moved on from Canton, where his father and coach, Gary Joe Kinne, was badly wounded by a gunshot from a bitter parent, to Gilmer, where he was coached by Jeff Traylor, now his chief rival at UTSA; to Texas and Tulsa; through seven pro football stops as a quarterback and occasional wide receiver or running back exposed to the coaching of Tom Coughlin, Chip Kelly, Doug Pederson, Ryan Day and Steve Spagnuolo; to five jobs in five years as an assistant under, among others, Chad Morris, Sonny Dykes, Todd Graham and Gus Malzahn, Kinne had pretty much seen it all. Too much, maybe. Like the 2017 Frisco Bowl, when Dykes, hired after Morris left for Arkansas and took most of his staff with him, put the young GA in charge of the offense against Louisiana Tech, a 51-10 flop. Until those responsibilities were thrust upon him, Kinne said, he was the typical GA who thought himself at least as smart as his bosses. Then the first night in the team hotel, three SMU players got in trouble. “I’m not ready for this,” Kinne thought. He grew up fast, same as Thursday’s counterpart, Kenny Dillingham. Like Kinne, Dillingham worked for Malzahn and is generally credited for salvaging Bo Nix’s professional prospects at Oregon. At his presser this week, Dillingham called Texas State the equivalent of “a power four football team” that could “compete in the Big 12.” He was just as effusive about the Bobcats’ coach. “I think people should talk more about the job that he’s done,” Dillingham said. “He’s going to be on most head coaches ‘Watch Lists’ to be a head coach in a power four level here in the next four months because of the job he’s done.” Kinne’s “Take Back Texas” theme has done wonders for more than the football team. Season-ticket sales more than doubled this year to 5,769. The stadium’s 30,000 capacity was full to the brim for last week’s blowout of UTSA, though a second straight sell-out could prove problematic for a midweek game. To that end, a Texas State student with a Thursday night class conflict mounted a campaign on “Maroon and Golden,” a Bobcat fan site, to seek cancellation of his class. He was subsequently chided for even thinking class might come before football. The Bobcats will have their hands full Thursday with Cam Skattebo, who ran 33 times for 262 yards in the Sun Devils’ win over Mississippi State last week. For his part, Dillingham is impressed with the quick release and decision-making of Texas State’s Jordan McCloud, now on his fourth school. Even Vegas can hardly decide who should win, making Arizona State a 1.5-point favorite as of Wednesday. Whatever happens, wrote Colton McWilliams of the San Marcos Daily Record, “Texas State has already won. San Marcos will be shown on a national stage in front of millions of people and the university in a spotlight where they can attract potential students to their school outside Texas.” Once it took a swimming pig to draw that level of attention to San Marcos, but not since Aquarena Springs folded. Texas State bought the land and made it an environmental research facility. No more swine dives. These days, it’s up to the football team to make a splash.

I don't like a lot of our uniform combos, or even everything about this particular one, but the script Cats is pretty sweet. If you've been paying attention, and judging by the attendance you haven't, we shiny-ed up the gold on our helmets this year and they look SO much better than the old matte version.

This cracks me up!

The latter. Marburger started the 2nd half. I believe the line is Texas -30.

It definitely doesn't. What it takes is competent coaching. 2022 TXST: 104 rush yards per game, 3.3 yards per attempt, 4 wins 2023 TXST: 187 rush yards per game, 4.6 yards per attempt, 8 wins 2023 OL were all transfers playing in their 1st year for TXST, and 4 of them came from FCS. 1st guy off the bench was a 4th year guy who had never started (not sure he'd even ever played on the OL - special teams only) and ended up starting 7 games due to an injury.