Life after death for SMU football
It's taken an eternity but the Mustangs are back in the national picture
Time to clear up some terminology:
— “Cheating.” That’s what college football and basketball teams did when they paid their players, or gave them “illegal inducements,” such as cars or clothes or small islands.
— “Rules.” Those were codified guidelines by the NCAA. Players were not to be compensated for the increasing amounts of hours that their sports were requiring of them. There was a similar system for certain workers in America that was ended on Jan. 1, 1863 by President Lincoln.
— “Probation.” That was the punishment the NCAA handed down after its investigations. Sometimes it was just the loss of some scholarships. A more powerful probation was a ban on TV appearances. Egregious offenders could lose the right to play in a bowl game or in the NCAA basketball championship. The probations tended to land on the heads of the less prestigious schools, although not always. It was UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian who observed, “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky that they’re going to give Cleveland State three more years.”
It all sounds so Byzantine, right? The fortunes that are flowing to Shedeur Sanders and Arch Manning and Livvy Dunne would have been inconceivable and scandalous 15 years ago. Newspaper reporters wore out their phones, and sometimes their shoes, tracking license plates of particularly sophisticated cars, in the parking lots of athletic dormitories. Coaches who ‘cheated” might as well have worn ankle bracelets for the rest of their lives.
That is why Southern Methodist University, situated on the mean streets of University Park in north central Dallas , is such a sign of the times.
In the 1970s and 1980s, SMU got caught cheating, was put on probation, got caught cheating again and lost a significant number of scholarships, and was advised by the NCAA that the “death penalty” statute would be activated if they cheated again. They did it anyway and they got caught again.
They should have known the NCAA had no sense of humor. The death penalty did indeed land on SMU in 1987. There would be no football that season. There would be no home games the next season. Fifty-five scholarships flew out the window. There would be no off-campus recruiting until the fall of 1988.
Eventually the whole Southwest Conference wound up on Death Row, thanks to other scandals. It was a 9-team league, eight of the teams from Texas, and it made perfect geographic and cultural sense. The more prominent programs wound up in the Big Eight (now Big 12) and the SEC. SMU went through more confederations than Austro-Hungary. The Mustangs were in the Western Athletic Conference, Conference USA and the American Athletic Conference. None were good fits. They were 3-19 for coach Forrest Gregg, the old Packer Hall of Famer who first tried to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. They did not have a winning season until 1997, and were 0-12 in 2003 and 1-11 in 2007 and 2008.
June Jones finally came to town and injected respectability, and SMU has actually played in eight bowl games since 2002. Sonny Dykes had four good years before he took the job at TCU, SMU’s Metroplex rival. The new coach was Rhett Lashlee, who had learned offense from Gus Malzahn. He began to see the light, because SMU, despite all its wounds, still had some major strengths. It had a new, functional, on-campus stadium, it had proximity to a lode of good high school players, and it never stopped having money, a $2 billion endowment to be specific. That doesn’t count the largesse of its donor class, some of whom would call J.R. Ewing a sharecropper.
When the ACC took on Stanford and Cal and realized it needed a refueling stop, it focused on SMU. The business transaction became a romance when SMU volunteered to excuse itself from conference revenue for nine years. That wasn’t a problem because of the gusher of local money, and it also coincided with the chaos of Transfer Ball. SMU was one of the first to establish collectives and start paying players more than the minimum wage. “We were so far ahead of the curve,” Bill Armstrong, an SMU benefactor, told the Dallas Morning News. “We invented NIL. It just took the NCAA 40 years to figure it out.”
SMU is now 11-1. Its only loss is a 3-pointer to Brigham Young, which was undefeated until two weeks ago. It ranks eighth in the latest College Football Playoff list. It plays Clemson in the ACC championship game in Charlotte Saturday. A win puts the Mustangs into the 12-team field automatically. A loss would endanger their position, depending on what else happens. Still, the Mustangs have a strong portfolio. It routed Pittsburgh, which was tied for the ACC lead at the time, and walloped TCU, 66-24.
A look at the roster clears up the mystery. SMU has nine transfers from Miami, including leading rusher Brashard Smith. It has four from Texas A&M, three from Texas, two from Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and others from LSU, Colorado, and Notre Dame. But some of it is just good old talent recognition and player development. Lashlee recruited quarterback Kevin Jennings from Dallas’ South Oak Cliff High, and Jennings’ only other serious suitors were Sam Houston and Lamar. Jennings took over the offense to win the American championship game last year, and replaced Christian Stone after the third game this season. SMU is 9-0 since. As you read the torrent of football recruiting stories this season, note that Jennings was a 3-star. Also note that Cam Ward, Miami’s quarterback and Heisman contender, started out at Incarnate Word.
So some of the conditions are unique to SMU. But the dissolution of college government has created its unpredictable weather system. Indiana will likely be in the CFP because its new coach, Curt Cignetti, brought a boatload of talent from James Madison with him. Syracuse used Kyle McCord, a rebounding quarterback from Ohio State, to go 8-4 and knock Miami out of the ACC game. Florida State went from 12-0 to 0-11. Vanderbilt, with Diego Pavia parachuting in from New Mexico State, beat Alabama and will go to a bowl. And Arizona State, picked to finish dead last in the Big 12, will play for the conference title against Iowa State.
Earlier this week, USC quarterback Miller Moss announced he would transfer. He had lost his starting job to Jayden Maiava. Interestingly, Moss said he was looking for a place where he could win a high level and compete for a national championship. That’s boilerplate language, used by all as they go out the door, but USC people always thought the highest level and the best chance for championship were right there in LA. As it is, Lincoln Riley has spent three years at USC, mined the transfer system expertly, had a Heisman Trophy QB in Caleb Williams, and has never played in the Rose Bowl, let alone won it, or won the Pac-12. In the same number of games, predecessor Clay Helton had won both a Rose Bowl and a Pac-12 and had won one more game than Riley. This year USC was 6-6, with four last-minute losses in Big 10 play, and Maiava ended the regular season by throwing 199 yards of pick-sixes to Notre Dame defenders.
Death, where is thy sting? Not at SMU, for the moment. Everyone else in college football needs a stress test.
SMU was the poster child of cheating in the 1980s because it was as much a part of the school's culture as well-funded students and an elite price tag for education. Those well-funded students became well-funded alumni who had no problem using those assets to feed the football machine in Texas. That machine chewed up some good people (my old friend Bobby Collins being one) and eventually chewed up the program. Now everything SMU had done wrong is right. And look what has happened! Irony abounds. I just shake my head at memories of Steve Alford being suspended for a game at IU because he appeared in a fund-raiser calendar for a sorority. Remember the $25 stipend to fund incidentals? Remember probation for alumni buying a recruit a meal or the school giving him a sweatsuit? Remember when coaches couldn't comment on potential recruits, much less take photos with them in school uniforms? It's pretty clear now that the old morals no longer matter. Sort of like politics. Good piece.
I disagree strongly with your comment that students athletes were the same as slaves. Nobody forced them to go to college and play sports. As it was, tuition was paid for, room and board was paid for, food was paid for, free tutoring, schedule your classes before everyone else, etc. It was quite a lot, compared to other students at the same school.