People really need to F off with the view that bowl games are special these days. Stop living in the past. This isn't 20 years ago where bowl invites were actually difficult to come by.
Wanna know how many bowl's MT would have gone to with Stock under the rules McCollum had? Back under McCollum in the SBC, you had to be the best team in your conference to get a bowl. Guess how many bowl games MT would have gone to under those rules with Stockstill?
Let me help you. A BIG FAT ZERO. 13 years. Zero bowl games.
Bowl games used to be special. They used to be difficult to attain.
Now they're a joke participation trophy for the most part unless you are playing in one of the more prestigious ones, which will never happen to us.
Comparing things to the SBC 1.0 days is a bit dramatic. Your general point is not unfounded, but the Sun Belt was the only conference that got one bowl invite and that was only during the first five or six years of the conference's existence.
Continuing to reach the admittedly bloated postseason should not be dismissed altogether, but no program is going to celebrate annual 7-5 seasons with occasional 8-4 mixed in, especially without so much as the occasional division.
Realistically the entire Stock era is defined by just being a game or two away from being really good.
2006 vs Troy is perhaps most notable as not only would that have given us an outright title, but we would have met Rice in New Orleans and probably won, as opposed to the CMU buzzsaw we ran into in Detroit. 9-3 with a conference championship and New Orleans Bowl win in year one could have changed Stock's trajectory altogether.
2007 and 2008 we're both 5-7 seasons, though both had a P5 game that very nearly went our way, the 2007 Virginia game that we got a bum spot on and didn't go for it on fourth and the 2008 Kentucky game that ended with a shoestring tackle.
The 2009 Troy game, I think we all know what happened there...
2012 was bookended by the headscratcher against McNeese and the drubbing by the Howl Yeahs and capped off with Benson screwing us out of a bowl(something I don't blame him for)
2015 Illinois and Vandy in back to back weeks.
2016 Western
As we all know, there are no asterisks, pictures, or stories in the record book, but a fan's memory is a different story.