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Memory tends to overestimate SMU. The Mustangs had one great stretch, and Eric Dickerson is a legend in the sport of football, but somewhere along the line, the story of how SMU earned its football program the death penalty inflated how effective that player payroll was.
SMU did not win back-to-back national championships. SMU claims back-to-back national championships, but the closest anyone else came to calling the Mustangs the champs was when something called the National Championship Foundation labeled them 20% of 1981’s champion, an “equal” figure alongside 12–0 Clemson, 10–1–1 Texas (who beat SMU head-to-head), 11–1 Pitt, and 9–3 (!) Nebraska. In 1982, not even the National Championship Foundation gave a title to SMU, though the Mustangs were at least more deserving than they were the year prior. 1982 SMU didn’t win many impressive games, but at least they didn’t lose.
When you’re told the story of SMU these days as a youth attending metaphorical college football Sunday school, you hear how hard they cheated and you say, “Wow, they must have won a lot of games!” Yes, your teacher says, They won ten games four years in a row! And seasons weren’t as long back then. Neglected in the account is SMU’s 4–3–1 record against ranked opponents over that four-year stretch, or how they were pummeled once by unranked Alabama in a Sun Bowl. The Pony Express is a great story, and Pony Excess was a great name for a 30 for 30, but college football culture wants SMU to have been better than what it was. There’s a mythology there. Like a lot of myths, it tells a good story rather than a factual one.
The facts are these:
- In SMU’s best four-season stretch, it went 41–5–1, including that 4–3–1 record against AP-ranked opponents. It claims two national titles, but it never finished a season ranked better than 2nd. In 1981, it completed the year ranked 5th.
- SMU claims a third national title, back in 1935, and someone fairly credible—the Dickinson System—did give them that one. SMU didn’t finish that season undefeated, but neither of the undefeated high-majors played in a bowl game. (SMU lost the Rose Bowl that year.)
- Aside from those five seasons and a few more good showings in the 20’s and 40’s, SMU’s never been much. Last year was SMU’s first time finishing the season ranked since 1984. They went the entire 1950’s and 1970’s without finishing a season in the top 25.
There’s a conception of SMU which says they’re the big, swaggering, rich folks from Dallas. This conception is mostly accurate, although the SMU caste’s dovetail with the Instagram industry has changed the flavor. Rich folks from Dallas don’t swagger like they used to. They hang out with the Bachelorette instead.
Either way, that’s what SMU is. SMU is Dallas, and SMU is rich. Where the conception loses the plot is when it says this wealth once built a great football program. A few good football teams? Yes. But even those fell short of the ultimate college football glory, and the approach was clearly unsustainable, as evidenced by the fact it resulted in the NCAA shutting the entire program down. (Imagine the lawsuits this would spawn today.) SMU bought a few good football teams. It didn’t buy a good football program, and it certainly didn’t build one.
One thing SMU did buy?
Power conference membership.
When?
Over the next seven years, technically.
Inspired by the stories of what they never were, SMU played the conference realignment game better than anybody else in the country. Remembering that they’d once nearly purchased a national championship, SMU reasoned that if they could inspire enough of the greater Highland Park area to take up a collection, they could probably gain admission to a Power Four league. That’s just what they did. As the ACC prepared to throw Stanford and Cal a lifeline, SMU wiggled its way into the room. Once there, the institution at the heart of one of the densest collections of high school talent in the country dropped seven years of TV revenue on the table and said, “Let us in.”
The situation was odd. Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina, and NC State were against adding anybody, recognizing that once the ACC’s preexisting media rights deal expired, these new schools would expect an equal revenue split, and their collective woefulness at football would result in an even smaller payday relative to the Big Ten and SEC. Partial ACC member Notre Dame was heavily in favor of the move, because Notre Dame wanted a stable ACC in football in order to keep the ACC stable in the other sports Notre Dame plays, sports where the ACC is arguably the best conference in the country. (Also, then-ND athletic director Jack Swarbrick went to law school at Stanford.) The other ten teams? Well, they didn’t know. Did they want to side with Swarbrick, or did they want to side with UNC? Stanford and Cal only wanted enough money to cover the cost of their travel. SMU didn’t want any money at all. Not for the first seven years, anyway. SMU wiggled into the room and offered to play for free. Any cent generated by the Mustangs would go straight into the pockets of schools like Florida State, Wake Forest, and Georgia Tech.
This all happened last August. 13–0 Florida State hadn’t missed the College Football Playoff yet. Still, the other ten ACC schools opted for self-preservation. They’d just seen the Big 12 survive by adding Cincinnati, BYU, Houston, and UCF. They knew there was strength in numbers. They knew the Big Ten would one day want UNC, and that Florida State and Clemson were going to bed dreaming of life in the Southeastern Conference. Ultimately, the ten sided with Notre Dame, and NC State jumped across the divide to provide the swing vote.
What was interesting about this was not the ACC adding Stanford and Cal. What was interesting was the ACC adding SMU. Even a pair of schools on the Pacific coast made more sense for the Atlantic Coast Conference than SMU did. Stanford and Cal are elite academic institutions. The ACC is the strongest power league when it comes to playing school. If UNC or UVA was in the Bay Area and didn’t care about sports, they would look a lot like Cal. Besides Northwestern or Notre Dame, the closest FBS comparison to Stanford is Duke. SMU, though? Fine academically but far from strong, weak in athletics other than football, only temporarily respectable in football…all SMU had going for it was that it was located in Dallas and that it would play for free. Somehow, that was enough.
I’m filling in a lot of gaps here with how the conversation happened. It’s possible there was an additional case for SMU that no one’s publicly made. It’s possible Notre Dame wasn’t as much a ringleader in their vacation home’s neighborhood as the leaks made them appear. I was not in the room. The facts are that SMU is in the ACC now as a full member in everything but revenue. If reports were correct at the time, SMU agreed to forgo TV revenue for its first seven seasons along the Atlantic Coast. That era effectively begins tonight, with a nationally broadcast home game against another newer power conference school, BYU.
What confuses me the most, looking back at this, is how no one else ever did it. Why did SMU and SMU alone create this opportunity for themselves? Other schools have successfully produced football programs that can compete with power conference schools. Couldn’t others play for free? Stanford and Cal reportedly accepted only enough revenue to cover travel costs, something like $9 million per year. This implies $9 million is the rough additional cost imposed on SMU. Can Boise State not raise itself $9 million a season to facilitate a comparable move?
My best guess is that Dallas sounded good, and that SMU sold itself well. It has a presidential library on campus, after all, and a lot of good athletes have come out of Highland Park High, not to mention however many hundred other schools sit within an hour’s drive. It caught the ACC at a vulnerable moment and pulled off a successful wooing. My best guess is that this could not have happened were the ACC not actively adding Stanford and Cal. SMU got in the room and stayed there until they became part of the strange package deal.
I do wonder, though, if ACC university presidents didn’t quite understand the history with SMU. These are academics making football decisions, and I’m not sure even football people really get what SMU was and wasn’t back in the day. Well done by the Mustangs. Their mythology won the day.
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One final note, because I can’t help myself:
The SWC is the most overrated conference in college football history. It didn’t win a single legitimate national championship after 1969. There was a reason it fell apart, and that reason is that its teams were losing too much, so when Texas and Texas A&M got the chance to go play with Oklahoma and Nebraska, they jumped at it. (Arkansas had fled for the SEC a few years earlier.) The SWC is a fun concept, but it would be of questionable strength today, and its teams are better today than they were when the league fell apart. Texas is better than it used to be, and so is TCU, and even though Baylor’s struggled the last two years, Baylor’s done a whole lot since escaping the SWC’s clutches. The SWC was a power conference in the 80’s the same way the Big East was a power conference in 2012.
History would be cooler if the stories were true.
But the SWC stunk,
And so did SMU.
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The game! And the other ones.
If you missed it yesterday, we already previewed the rest of the Week 2 slate. Tonight, there are just three games: SMU hosts BYU, Northwestern hosts Duke, and Indiana hosts Western Illinois.
If you’re wondering if IU/WIU could get fun, you can stop. I would put few things past Indiana football, especially before Curt Cignetti has time to get things together in Bloomington, but I would put fewer things past WIU. The Leathernecks recently left the MVFC, retreating from nationally competitive FCS football for the safer confines of the OVC. Our model thinks Indiana’s the worst team in the Big Ten. It has the Hoosiers favored by 47 and a half points.
The other two, though, should be good. Though it didn’t hold up down the stretch, BYU performed adequately in its first Big 12 season, and Kalani Sitake brings back a reasonable amount of last year’s team. SMU is better, and SMU’s playing at home, and SMU had an extra chance to iron out kinks, nearly suffering a horrendous upset in Reno back in Week Zero. But the fact SMU almost got upset in that game revealed something about this team: Discipline and focus are a challenge. The talent is solid and Rhett Lashlee’s a good schematic coach, but the program, true to its brand, isn’t guaranteed to show up every week. They’ll probably win, and if they can erase some of those discipline doubts, that could be enough to make us call them an ACC contender again, like a whole lot of people did coming into the year.
In the later game, both Northwestern and Duke are looking to get to 2–0. Northwestern took on the tougher test last week, playing the reigning MAC champion while Duke hosted Elon, but we know neither team particularly well. Manny Diaz is in his first year in Durham. David Braun is in his first year as a non-interim in Evanston. There might be a good bit of wind coming off the lake at that temporary stadium. Both teams are more gifted defensively than offensively. If you liked Ravens vs. Chiefs, that will have little correlation with your enjoyment of the sport these teams will play.
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I swear we’ll get this posted in the morning tomorrow. Sunday will be the real challenge, though.
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