GJ Winne

Kinne played QB for Morris (OC for Todd Graham) at Tulsa in 2010, then a GA for him at SMU in 2017.

Past the TXST enrollment deadline - last day to add a class was Jan 17. What's curious is that Finley announced he's going to WKU, but there's nothing from the school/football program yet. Regardless, JdL was brought in to play over Finley because Finley is a cement footed pro-style QB and Kinne wants a dual threat guy. See: Cam Ward.

Mike Craven is a fucking moron. Sources: Texas State transfer quarterback Jayden de Laura no longer with team You got it from the same tweet the rest of us did, dickwad.

Jayden de Laura withdrew from TXST today. Good News: No more rapey QB on campus. Bad News: We have 1 QB on the roster. RSF w/ no other FBS offers out of HS. Rumor that our stud WR Hobert may leave as well. Both may follow Stutzmann to SJSU.

Great, now some Barking Carnival retread is on the warpath. 🙄🙄

As mentioned previously, it shouldn't have been a surprise. The fans have known about it for weeks. Not sure what the protocol is for consulting the QB that is holding out for NIL w/ one foot out the door about bringing in another QB. Finley only publicly announced his intention to return about 2 hours before de Laura committed, and I suspect he only did that because he knew de Laura was coming in, and he'd have an excuse to leave. Damn sure wish Kinne would have brought someone without rape on their resume, but he had to bring in a QB, and it had to be a starting caliber QB because Finley had been [allegedly] saying he wanted $100K to stay*. If Kinne does nothing and Finley leaves for greener pa$ture$, we're stuck with a RSF and a true freshman - neither with impressive offer lists. It wasn't an option to not bring in another QB, because we can't have those two as our #s 2 and 3 either. *Last season, Finley got the lion's share of a $50K NIL deal that was split between about a dozen guys, got a F150 to drive, and was getting money from some energy drink and Adidas as well.

Yes. He felt like Kinne ambushed him by bringing in a P5 starting caliber QB, so he hit the portal the next day. Never mind that Kinne had been following the kid for a while and the WR coach had a relationship from both WSU and HS in Hawaii w/ him. IMO, Finley got very bad advice from his NIL agent, who was all over TJ's instagram announcement that he was leaving. Looks like TJ will end up at Western Kentucky - or at least that's where he's currently CB'd to. Somehow I doubt he's going to get the $100K in NIL he was *allegedly* asking for there.

Yuck indeed. This has really fucked up the immaculate vibes we had following this amazing season and going into next season w/ so many players staying and a really favorable schedule. Now our big stud QB is gone w/ a rapist replacing him. Kinne has pissed away a world of support over this. Really frustrating, especially given the big picture of the program trajectory. Why can't we have nice things???

They ran out on the TXST side in the 1st quarter. People started going to the end zone and Rice side for beers and drinking Truly. They ran out of all alcohol in the stadium during the 3rd quarter.

Not a true story at all. Urban legend that Bobcats have been all too happy to perpetuate over the years.

We were definitely pumped about Dallas being the location. Best possible option for TXST, hands down. Huge alumni base in DFW, day after Xmas made it easy for travel from the rest of the state, Ford is bigger than Frisco (that was the other most likely option). We never would have got that many fans to New Orleans, Hawaii, Mobile, Myrtle Beach, Birmingham, Boise, etc. Baylor was our offensive peak, sadly. The playcalling hasn't been anywhere near as aggressive, balanced or opportunistic since. They were trying to avoid kicking to the guy who avgs 23 yards per return. Fucking brutal. Reminiscent of Tech @ UT a couple of weeks back. Saps the crowd energy and it was cold last night, so especially in the 2nd half those flags/injuries were a beating. 1st winning season in 9 years. 7-5 in 2014. Hands down the best coach since Wacker, albeit a very low bar. We are all very aware Kinne is in San Marcos short term. That's how G5 positions work, but HC only get poached when they do well, so we'll take it while we've got it. 😆😆😆 Do you mean admissions standards? How does that work when A&M is taking 5K more freshman off the top than they were 10 years ago, and the SEC schools are taking another 5K? Those are kids with solid grades who went to TXST in 2015 and are now out of the talent pool for us. We passed 30K students in 2009 and are currently just under 39K. Adding Master's and Doctoral programs every year it seems. We'll be R1 here in the next 5-ish years. Not sure what more you want out of a school like ours - there will always be a hierarchy pyramid, and we'll always be right about where we are today in the grand scheme of Texas higher ed.

Some Coaches Called Texas State a “Career-Killer.” G.J. Kinne Made It His Calling Card. In his first year in San Marcos, Kinne has coached the Bobcats to a winning record and the school’s first-ever appearance in a postseason bowl game. Deion Sanders was college football’s hottest name this season after he infused the University of Colorado with seventy new players through high school recruiting and the NCAA transfer portal. Less attention went to the team with the second-largest overhaul: the Texas State Bobcats, who added 53 new faces to their roster. Somehow, first-year Texas State head coach G. J. Kinne forged a 7–5 team from all those new faces, proving wrong the peers who warned him Texas State could be a career-killer. Kinne’s two most recent predecessors in San Marcos compiled a 20–63 record over the previous seven seasons. Now, the Bobcats are headed to their first-ever bowl game, against Rice University in the First Responder Bowl on December 26. The Bobcats’ historic turnaround has earned Kinne a contract extension and a raise, and it began with a headline-grabbing upset of Baylor in September. That game showed off what would become Texas State’s calling cards: a furious offensive pace that produced 36 points and 470.8 yards per game, a fly-to-the-football defense that led the nation in tackles for losses, and special teams that returned two kickoffs for touchdowns. “It’s probably going back to the competitor I am and the confidence I have,” Kinne told me. “Even my agent was telling me, ‘I don’t know if you want to take that job. I think you’re going to be able to get something better later.’ I’m like, ‘Nope, this is the one I want. I want to go in and change it and hopefully be here for a really long time because of the location and believing I can do this.’ “I tell our transfers I don’t care where you’re coming from,” the 35-year-old coach went on. “People really don’t care. They just want to know if you’re going to work hard and if you care about the team. That’s what I’ve tried to do every time I’ve gone to a new place, whether playing or coaching. Just go in, work hard, and start developing relationships.” Kinne was a hot name on the coaching carousel after his 2022 season at the University of the Incarnate Word, in San Antonio, thanks to a 12–2 record and an offense that averaged 51.5 points per game. Those who know him best are neither surprised that Kinne accepted the challenge of Texas State or that he has succeeded beyond almost anyone’s wildest expectations. Perhaps the best way to understand the nearly miraculous job Kinne has pulled off in San Marcos is to go back eighteen years to a spring afternoon at the New York Giants headquarters in New Jersey. The Giants had invited Kinne and a handful of other quarterbacks to their 2005 spring tryouts to fill out the team’s depth chart. After Kinne had finished a series of passing drills, the Giants then-defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo approached with an odd request. “Hey, we’re about to work out some safeties,” he said. “Have you ever played safety?” As a matter of fact, he had. Kinne didn’t mention the last time he played safety was during his high school days in East Texas, when he was one of the most heralded quarterbacks in the land. But if the Giants needed a safety, by gosh, he’d be happy to play some. How hard could it be? “I was just trying to create value for myself,” he said. “I knew the playbook. I knew all the plays.” He tried out alongside six other defensive backs and was the only one offered a contract. It remains a point of pride for Kinne. Although he never got into a game with either of his two NFL organizations, the Giants and Philadelphia Eagles, Kinne considers his time in professional locker rooms, watching how NFL organizations were run, to have been invaluable training for all that would follow. “I think I’ve known forever that I wanted to coach,” he said. “I knew I wanted to play in the NFL, and then I wanted to coach. It was just whether I was coach in the NFL or college. I think it’s a little bit more fun in college. I like being the head coach and the GM. I get to evaluate, I get to sign, I get to pretty much do it all at the college level, where in the NFL, you’ve got one or two guys that do that.” Amid countless stories his peers tell about Kinne’s people skills, creativity, and energy, his decision to accept the challenge at Texas State perhaps says more about him than anything else. Like a few million other Texans, he’d floated the Hill Country rivers around San Marcos and had been struck by the area’s beauty. With nearly 40,000 undergraduates surrounded by all that Texas high school football talent, he saw the program as a sleeping giant. “You always kind of wondered why it hadn’t happened there,” he said. For one thing, the school never joined the arms race of facilities and coaching salaries. Kinne’s task would be winning enough games to get the university’s sizable alumni base interested in writing checks to support the program and buying tickets to build a winning team. He could look down the road where his mentor and close friend, Jeff Traylor, had built a winner at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Could Kinne do the same at Texas State? “We didn’t accomplish all our goals this year, but I think getting to that bowl game and hopefully getting that eighth win will be a huge step in the right direction,” Kinne said. Texas State quarterback T. J. Finley, who was previously at LSU and Auburn, threw 24 touchdown passes and had a 68.6 completion percentage. Wide receiver Joey Hobert caught eight touchdown passes and had 847 receiving yards after transferring from Utah Tech. In rebuilding the Bobcats roster, Kinne focused on Texas high school players. His motto is “take back Texas,” and his roster has 94 Texans. His first recruiting class had an unusual breakdown of 46 transfers and seven high school recruits. “I wish we would’ve signed more high school kids,” Kinne said. “But it’s just so hard with the transfer portal to really go all high school nowadays. “But it’s not the reality of college football anymore,” he went on. “I think we always have to sign Texas high school kids because of the development part of it, because of the culture that you want to build. And Texas is the best high school football there is, the best coaching there is. You can get some really, really good players that maybe Texas doesn’t take or OU doesn’t take. You can still get NFL-caliber players.” Kinne’s other challenge in San Marcos was figuring out which players he wanted from the portal. To do full scouting reports on the hundred of eligible athletes would have been nearly impossible. Instead, he leaned on his relationships with Texas high school coaches. “His first week on the job, we went to the Texas High School Coaches Association’s offices,” Texas State athletic director Don Coryell told me, “and they were having one of their larger annual meetings with their coaches from across the state. My intention was to introduce G. J. as our new coach, but when he walked into the room, probably forty people came up to hug him and tell him it was great to see him again. I realized what kind of network he already had in place.” Kinne’s assistant coaching stops include SMU, Arkansas, Hawaii, and Central Florida, along with a special-projects assignment for the Eagles. Along the way, he has picked the brains of coaching luminaries like Chip Kelly, Doug Pederson, Sonny Dykes, and Ryan Day, among others. And then there’s Traylor, the most important man in Kinne’s life outside of his dad. Gary Joe Kinne Jr. was the coach at Canton High School in 2005 when an unhappy parent of a player shot him in the chest. G. J. Kinne was initially told that his dad had died. He hadn’t, but he’d come close. At the lowest point in his young life, the sixteen-year-old Kinne turned to Traylor, the hugely successful coach at Gilmer High School seventy miles away. “I dealt with it the best I could,” Kinne told the Athletic this summer. “It definitely changed me as a person. Anytime there’s that type of trauma involved and someone does that to your father, who’s basically your hero, it’s gonna stay with you forever.” Kinne wanted out of Canton, saying, “I no longer felt safe there.” He and Traylor met at a Dairy Queen, where a relationship of mutual respect was born. It endures to this day. “We gave him unconditional love,” Traylor told the Athletic. “We treated him like he was one of our own from the very beginning.” Kinne played one season for Traylor at Gilmer, throwing 47 touchdown passes in an undefeated regular season. Later, they would work together on the coaching staffs at SMU and Arkansas. Traylor’s son Jordan was a groomsman in Kinne’s wedding. Kinne’s younger brother, McLane, won a state championship playing for Traylor at Gilmer. When UTSA and Texas State played in the second week of this season, both men called it one of the most awkward games of their lives. UTSA won 20–13. “I know for a fact that dude loves me,” Kinne told me. “I’m like a son to him. If I needed something, I know he’d be there for me. It’s just a unique situation. When we played, that was the hardest game for me because I pull for him every week, and I couldn’t that week.” “He’s a pied piper with kids,” Traylor told me. “Kids love him. He has an unbelievably kind spirit. He loves people. And you can’t fake that stuff. That’s just who G. J. is. He’s like my own son, pretty much. My son and him are best of friends.” As for Kinne’s coaching acumen, Traylor said: “He’s got a great football IQ. Everybody talks about him being a player’s coach and how much he loves kids, but they kind of forget he’s still got to coach ball. And the kid knows a lot of football. He’s been around some great coaches. He’s seen a lot of great things. He’s got a great football IQ and a lot of common sense. He can spot talent, he can recruit it, and he’s really good with kids.” Kinne texted Traylor before Texas State’s victory over Baylor to thank him for all his support and encouragement through the years. Traylor did not see it until moments after his own team lost a 17–14 heartbreaker to Houston on the same day. He immediately fired back a congratulatory text. When Kinne got his players alone in the locker room after the Bobcats’ 42–31 victory in Waco, his thoughts flashed to the furious pace of the past year, of so many players coming and going and the feeling that he might never catch up. He brought so many players into the program, in part, because so many were leaving from the roster he inherited. Some of them were players he couldn’t talk into staying. In that joyous moment, he thanked the players who had stayed, grabbing defensive end Jordan Revels and telling him, “Man, I appreciate you for believing in us. I know you could have left, but you decided to stay and so I just appreciate you for that.” “You get a young vibe from him,” linebacker Dan Foster, who came from Marshall, told the Austin American-Statesman. “He gives it to you straight. He’s a young coach who understands today’s football players and how we think. I feel like we’re going to win now. He wants us to practice today like we’re already champions.” There were tough times, too. The Bobcats were 4–1 and one of the most interesting stories in college football at the beginning of October when they went on the road and allowed Louisiana to score two touchdowns in the final six minutes of a 34–30 defeat. They were routed 77–31 by Arkansas State in the next-to-last game of the season before finishing with a 52–44 win over South Alabama. Beating Rice in the First Responder Bowl would give Texas State eight wins for the first time since 2008. “This was not an easy year by any means,” Kinne said. “There were many times I was like, ‘Whew, I don’t know. Just put your head down and go to work because it’s not looking good.’ “So we were able to come out and make the most of it,” he continued. “I think the pride you saw in the alumni and the community, especially after we beat Baylor and got to the bowl game, it’s fun now. You see people in the stands, and you see the belief and the expectations. After you beat Baylor, people are like, ‘Oh, you should win every game.’ Well, that’s the way I feel, so I get it. We’re not there yet. There were a couple of games this year where we just didn’t know how to win yet. Hopefully, next year we don’t have those games.” https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/texas-state-football-coach-gj-kinne-first-responder-bowl/

It's wild that so many of y'all have no clue what D1 looks like. He could have started at half of G5 and 90% of FCS last year as a true freshman.

Not sure why TXST doesn't show up in ALL on that graphic, but we had 39 transfers and went from 4 to 7 wins. Not like we just had a little dip in W/L, either - it was an absolute shit roster through and through. Completely different product on the field. 2022 vs 2023

1st Bowl Game in Bobcat History* *1st FBS Bowl - The D2 Championship Game was called the Palm Bowl, and played in McAllen, TX, when we won it in 1981 and 1982.

He was notoriously terrible at TXST, that's for damn sure. Shit offense w/ no discernable identity and refused to play a 2nd QB when QB1 was sucking hind tit. it was fucking maddening. So happy he's at Baylor because he's going to get exposed like a motherfucker.

7-5 and going bowling. Eat 'Em Up! Most wins since 2015 (also 7), first bowl game for the program since moving to FBS in 2012. 55 points tonight to close the season out on a high note. 36ppg is +15 over last year.

nah

Definitely don't need to worry about it this year.

Uh....it's held up perfectly. TXST is UTSA's best win. 6-5 TXST 3-8 Temple 4-7 UAB 4-7 FAU 2-9 ECU 4-7 UNT 5-6 Rice 5-6 USF

Traylor [allegedly] said no to Tech so he could wait for Texas or aTm. He's in a great spot to wait out the right opportunity.

Same, even in his highlight clips. I eagerly look forward to this year's playoff predictions. 😃😃

Thoughts on Reagan's QB, Brad Jackson? He's committed to TXST, but I haven't seen him at all, other than hudl vids.