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Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff Writer
Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran on Sept. 6. The story has been updated ahead of SMU’s playoff game with Penn State.
IN THE 1980s, SMU and Dallas became synonymous with free-flowing money in college football, a small school in a big city that turned into a playground for rich boosters who would spare no expense to make sure their team became a major player. It worked, albeit not for long. The Mustangs became pariahs, ultimately getting crushed by the NCAA’s “death penalty” in 1987. SMU was the only program in history considered so corrupt that it had to be shut down.
If only those boosters could’ve fast-forwarded 40 years. The sins of SMU’s past are now virtues in college football.
The money — NIL means Now It’s Legal — is flowing again in Dallas, and SMU is in a major conference, the ACC, cutting an unprecedented deal to forgo television revenue for nearly a decade as a devoted group of deep-pocketed boosters pledges to cover the shortfall, while also funding a leading NIL collective. The Ponies are back in the game.
“We don’t embrace the mistakes of our past,” Mustangs coach Rhett Lashlee said. “But we do embrace the history of our past.”
For all this to happen, it took power players who knew how to wheel and deal, lots of money and some Dallas bravado — all of which are in abundance on the Hilltop. Most schools make a conference move to get more television revenue, not less. But SMU just wanted a seat at the table. SMU’s chairman of the board, David Miller, fired his metaphorical six-shooter in the air when he explained how the program could go without television revenue for nine years: The money didn’t matter to them.
“It’s a couple hundred million dollars,” Miller told Yahoo. “I’m not losing sleep over it.”
That’s because this is college football in Texas, and none of it looks like a risk to people like oilman Bill Armstrong, a billionaire who has made his name and fortune by risking it all. Considered perhaps the greatest wildcatter in history, he’s a protégé of legendary oilman (and Oklahoma State mega-booster) T. Boone Pickens, and his company made the third-largest oil discovery in U.S. history in Alaska in 2013.
He’s also old college buddies with former stars Eric Dickerson and Craig James, and his name, along with his wife Liz’s, now adorns the Mustangs’ practice facility as well as the football offices in SMU’s new Weber End Zone Complex, a $100 million facility that opened this season, with the Armstrongs pledging $15 million toward the project.
“I was at SMU when we were great,” Armstrong said. “I was there when the Pony Express was there, and I saw how important having a major college football team is to a good university.”
He watched as SMU minimized athletics, as his old friend Dickerson publicly suggested SMU should drop football if it wasn’t committed, and as the Mustangs suffered through decades of futility. Now, Armstrong is part of a generation of boosters who personally felt the pain of SMU being left behind after the Southwest Conference died, but now have the ability — and the balance sheets — to push their way back toward the top of the sport.
“I bet a lot of these schools look at SMU and go, ‘Oh, s—, here come all the billionaires,'” Armstrong said. “We’ve been the whipping boy for so long. We’re not going to blow it. There’s a lot of pent-up fun to be had.”
DALLAS WAS BOOMING in the 1980s and SMU was right in the middle of it. The downtown skyline was transformed by new skyscrapers, and “Dallas,” the prime-time soap opera, was No. 1 in the national Nielsen ratings, highlighting the oil and cattle scions of the Ewing family. And no place symbolized the ambition of Dallas like SMU, one of the nation’s priciest colleges in the city’s most affluent enclave.
SMU was starved for football success. Prior to the 1980 season, the Mustangs had had 10 consensus All-Americans in school history, and five of those played before 1952. The Dallas Cowboys arrived in 1960, and the city fell for pro football while the Mustangs fell on hard times. In the ’60s and early ’70s, Hayden Fry had just three winning seasons in 11 years at SMU, going 49-66-1 before becoming a legend at Iowa. His successor, Dave Smith, went 16-15-2 in three seasons and landed SMU on probation for paying players, before being fired and replaced by 35-year-old Ron Meyer, who arrived from UNLV and stepped right into the fire. The week he was hired in 1976, the NCAA extended SMU’s probation a year to 1977.
Meyer, a dapper, charismatic salesman, was a perfect fit. Keeping up with the Joneses was the nature of the old Southwest Conference, where every recruiting battle was personal between eight Texas teams and Arkansas, and Meyer wasn’t afraid to jump into the mix. In the conference in the 1980s, only Arkansas and Rice escaped probation. These were open secrets: Dickerson famously showed up at SMU in a Trans Am that was publicly rumored to have been paid for by a Texas A&M booster. It was commonly called the Trans A&M, despite Dickerson repeatedly claiming his grandmother bought it for him.
But SMU was offering plenty of cash and perks, too, including a payroll for players. As a result, the Mustangs earned NCAA investigators plenty of frequent-flyer miles. In 12 seasons, SMU was placed on probation five times for improper benefits.
It was almost a badge of honor, like the adage says: If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.
“Certainly, the culture embraced the arrogance,” said Thaddeus Matula, an SMU alum and the director of “Pony Excess,” the ESPN documentary about the SMU scandal. Students wore T-shirts that celebrated: “Ponies. Polos. Porsches. Probation. Nowhere but SMU.”
Then the fun stopped. The NCAA was onto SMU’s slush-fund operation for players. But Bill Clements authorized payroll payments to continue, saying they had a “moral obligation” to finish the payments they’d promised. And who was going to tell him any different? Clements was not just the chairman of the board of governors at SMU, he was the governor of Texas. SMU’s president, Donald Shields, tried to dissuade Clements, according to “A Payroll to Meet,” a book about the scandal published in 1989. “You stay out of it,” the governor replied. “Go run the university.”
The NCAA didn’t stay out of it, opting instead for the nuclear option. On Feb. 25, 1987, NCAA director of enforcement David Berst held a news conference to announce that 13 players were still paid $61,000 over two seasons, with payments ranging from $50 to $725 per month. As a result of the brazen disregard of previous sanctions, Berst announced that SMU would receive the “death penalty,” then fainted into the arms of school officials.
The NCAA shut down SMU football for the 1987 season, and further restrictions led the program to remain idle in 1988 as well. The fallout was dramatic.
“It almost brought the entire university to its knees,” Miller said, noting that SMU has a large board. “Something like 40 or 42 trustees resigned and the university president was terminated. You’re talking about a rudderless ship. Applications for enrollment plummeted. And donor giving? Who in their right mind is going to write a big check to an institution that’s in turmoil?”
Football returned in 1989, and SMU won one or zero games seven times in the next 20 seasons. The woes were only exacerbated when the SWC dissolved in 1995. Nobody wanted the Ponies, and the Ponies weren’t even sure they wanted to play major college football, with the administration content to being relegated to the WAC and Conference USA. SMU finished .500 or better just twice in those two decades, once in 1997 and again in 2006.
Dickerson couldn’t believe it. In 1980, he and James had led SMU to an upset of Texas in Austin, its first win over the Longhorns since 1966. Long-suffering alums poured into the locker room, some on walkers, some in wheelchairs, with tears streaming down their faces, telling Dickerson they’d been waiting 20 years for that day.
“I’ll never forget,” Dickerson said. “I told my best friend, ‘Boy, I hope that’s not us one day.’ Sure enough, that’s been us.”
Dickerson earned the ire of fans when he said in 2014 that SMU should drop football if the university wasn’t going to commit the resources necessary, saying at the time that the program “doesn’t exist.”
“We’re only winning three or four games a year. It was a joke,” Dickerson said this week. “They got pissed at me when I said, ‘Why don’t we just get rid of the program?’ If you stop being a laughingstock, we’re not a laughingstock anymore.”
Phil Bennett, an east Texan who played for Texas A&M and coached at five different Texas schools in addition to stints at LSU, Oklahoma and Kansas State, is one of the most connected coaches in the state. The Mustangs hired him in 2002 to try to turn things around, but the program still wasn’t a priority.
Bennett went 18-52 over six seasons, admitting it was difficult watching TCU, one of his former employers and SMU’s biggest rival, go all-in. Meanwhile, SMU was still wary of dipping its toes back into the water, humiliated by the scandal and focusing on rebuilding the university’s reputation.
“The faculty senate ran the university,” Bennett said. “We didn’t take the initiative. … SMU was still in the phase of beating ourselves up and not being aggressive in changing leagues.”
SMU coaches had trouble getting players past its admissions office, and it was almost impossible to land transfers.
“It was harder for a football player to be accepted to SMU than to Stanford,” said Matula, a student from 1997 to 2001. “We couldn’t even offer a scholarship until after they were accepted to the university, which for the most part was after the signing date had happened. The energy just wasn’t there to turn the tide because not only was it set up to fail, people didn’t care. Around campus there’d be more T-shirts of other schools than for SMU. The average student SAT score went down a hundred points. That’s how much a draw major college athletics are at a school, especially in Texas.”
And donors didn’t want to write checks to support a team that used to play Texas but was now playing against East Carolina instead.
Meanwhile, Gary Patterson willed rival TCU to six top-10 finishes from 2008 to 2017. TCU admissions applications went up 42% after the Frogs’ 2010 undefeated season, including a Rose Bowl win over Wisconsin.
“We languished athletically at a time when a lot of universities around the country were embracing the fact that athletic success has a major, major impact on the overall brand of the university,” Miller said.
Administrators who could see TCU’s transformation started to warm up to competing in the sport’s upper echelons again, beginning with Dickerson reaching out to June Jones, the former Atlanta Falcons coach who had turned Hawai’i’s program around, to sell him on a rebuild in Dallas. After a 1-11 season in 2008 in his first season, Jones went 35-30 in his next five seasons, including SMU’s first bowl game in 25 years, and won three bowl games in four years. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so farfetched that the Mustangs could win.
In 2018, Sonny Dykes arrived and laid out a blueprint for winning at SMU, leaning into them as Dallas’ team. He aggressively mined the transfer portal, especially to persuade DFW area recruits who had gone elsewhere to return home. In 2019, SMU won 10 games for the first time since 1984, and there was a familiar feeling again.
“That season helped justify everybody’s feelings,” Lashlee said. “Like, man, we want to go all-in.”
But then Dykes, the coach who beat TCU in consecutive years for the first time since 1992-93 and went 25-10 over his last three seasons, was lured to Fort Worth when the Frogs parted ways with Patterson during the 2021 season. At TCU, Dykes landed a Big 12 job while SMU was still hoping and searching for a better home. Prior to Dykes’ arrival, Chad Morris left for Arkansas. The departures were yet another reminder SMU wasn’t all the way back, and only steeled the boosters’ resolve to stabilize the program.
“Nothing rallies an alumni base more than being stabbed in the back, or whatever you want to call what Sonny did,” Armstrong said. “He proved to the world that you can win here, you can recruit here. I totally get why he left to get into the Big 12. But there were a lot of pissed-off alums, me included.”
MILLER, THE 6-FOOT-8 former SMU basketball player, also happens to be a billionaire oilman who, along with his wife, Carolyn, has donated more than $100 million to the school, where the basketball teams play on David B. Miller Court. The 73-year-old founder of EnCap Investments, an oil and gas private equity firm, speaks in a soft Texas drawl, which he used to sell the virtues of SMU and Dallas to conference officials, eventually convincing the ACC.
As a player, Miller won a Southwest Conference title in basketball in 1972, and he believes the only thing holding SMU back in recent years was its Group of 5 status. “You’re never going to recruit a four-star or five-star football or basketball player,” he said. “The coaches can’t talk fast enough.”
So, when last year’s chaotic wave of realignment opened a door, SMU was ready to kick it down. The enthusiasm galvanized an SMU faithful convinced they had been blocked by other schools that saw the Mustangs as a threat if they had equal standing again. And that might be true: SMU raised a record $159 million during the 2023-24 fiscal year for athletics, including $100 million in just five days after the Sept. 1 announcement that SMU had landed an ACC spot.
“Is it endless in terms of what our donors can do? I wouldn’t say that,” Miller said. “But I’d say to you that there is a mountain of excitement and enthusiasm that we’re back.”
Those record-breaking donations didn’t just come from a few wealthy wildcatters. There were four donations of eight figures, 35 of seven figures and 82 of six figures.
“There are some oilmen in the mix that absolutely helped lead the charge,” Miller said. “But it took more than oilmen.”
Still, there are lots of oilmen. In 2022, boosters launched the Boulevard Collective, formed by Chris Kleinert, CEO of Hunt Realty Investments and the son-in-law of famed oilman R.L. Hunt (net worth: $7.2 billion, according to Forbes) who is also one of the boosters who helped with the ACC move, and Kyle Miller, son of David Miller and the president and CEO of Silver Hill Energy Partners.
By that fall, the Boulevard Collective signed every football and basketball player to standard NIL deals of $36,000 annually, according to On3. The Ponies have the payroll working again, and this time it’s all aboveboard.
“From the get-go, we’ve had what I would describe as a robust NIL program,” David Miller said.
SMU proved it this offseason, adding heft for the new ACC schedule with 18 Power 4 transfers, including eight on the defensive line. The Mustangs landed transfers from Michigan, Ohio State, Oregon, Georgia, Texas, Texas A&M, Utah, two from Oklahoma and three each from Miami and Arkansas.
“We’re getting serious again. If you’re half-assed in and half-assed out, it’s not going to work,” Dickerson said. “Look, Eric Dickerson didn’t just become a football player. I had some talent, and I worked my ass off at it. That’s what I did. That is what SMU is doing now. They’re working their ass off to get things done, to get people to come, get players to want to come.”
The Mustangs are no longer on the fringes of college football. Lashlee, who came to SMU with Dykes as his offensive coordinator in 2018, returned to Dallas in 2022 to replace his old coach, coming from Miami, where he spent two years as offensive coordinator. He was sold on the potential of the program based on his time under Dykes.
“When you take a job, the first impression you’re trying to figure out is, OK, what are the issues?” Lashlee said. “Like SMU, or when I went to Miami, why have they not been winning? [Sonny and I] had been here about six months and one day we looked at each other and said, ‘Other than the conference, what’s the reason we can’t win here?’ And there really wasn’t one.”
Last season, Lashlee led the Mustangs to an 11-3 finish and an AAC title, their first conference championship since 1984. When the ACC announcement came, Miller proclaimed to ESPN that day that “the beast is about to emerge,” while Lashlee remarked that SMU was the only school in Dallas-Fort Worth in a top-three conference, a not-so-subtle shot across the Metroplex at TCU, which calls itself “DFW’s only Big 12 school.” After years of envy, SMU alums are ready to be equals, aghast that they had to watch their former peers play big-time football.
“Everybody kept talking about TCU. It’s just TCU,” Lance McIlhenny, Dickerson’s old Pony Express quarterback, told ESPN in 2019. “They’re nothing special other than they’ve had deep pockets for 15 years. I want to win a bunch of games and play a team like Baylor in whatever setting and put a shellackin’ on ’em.”
Bennett said SMU being restored to its former standing, with administrative backing and a unified front of deep-pocketed donors, will make the Mustangs a threat.
“They’ve become legit,” Bennett said. “It’s almost beyond comprehension for those of us who’ve been involved in it. You look at the state of Texas, they’re right up there. I’m happy for them. I’m proud of David and Carolyn Miller because they’ve always been great alumni, but not many people are willing to put that much money where their mouth is.”
Those power players did what they had to do to get the Mustangs here. Now, thrilled to have a seat at the table in the ACC, they know they still need to capitalize, because in college sports, there are no long-term guarantees anymore.
“Is our expectation that we’re going to be able to compete for championships within two to three years?” Miller asked. “The answer to that is yes.”
Lashlee doesn’t mind hearing that from the people who write his checks.
“Yeah, we have high expectations. We welcome ’em,” Lashlee said. “We’re going to get so much from being a part of the ACC. That was really the last piece we needed in terms of recruiting and the chance to build our program back to the national level.”
It took four decades, a lot of patience and even more money to get here. Now it’s time for the Mustangs to Pony Up on the field.
“We’re in Dallas, Texas,” Armstrong said. “We’re in the center of the football universe. Moses roamed through the desert shorter than SMU has been roaming the bad football years. It’s about time we came back.”
