LITTLE ROCK — Southern Methodist University had the best football team money could buy when I was an undergraduate there in the early 1980s. We knew it from the sports cars parked outside the practice field and from the conversations during happy hour at the bars along nearby Greenville Avenue in Dallas.
We we re not alone. Texas newspapers were filled with articles about NCAA investigations into lawlessness by one Southwest Conference rival or another. No one cared much. In 1982, the Pony Express, as running backs Eric Dickerson and Craig James were known, had led SMU to an 11-0-1 record and the No. 2ranking in the nation.
SMU won 61 games in the first six years of the 1980s, captured two conference championships outright and tied for another. Mustang mania was rampant, its most fervent manifestations being the keg-filled buses that shuttled students to Texas Stadium on game day.
On Feb. 25, 1987, however, the party ended when the NCAA announced that it had given SMU the so-called death penalty: Its football program was being shut down for a year.
It seems we really did field the best football team money could buy; the NCAA had discovered a $61,000 slush fund that paid players even as SMU was serving a two-year probation.
Six days later, Gov. Bill Clements of Texas, an oilman and the chairman of SMU’s board of governors, held a news conference and used the kind of logic that had turned television’s J.R. Ewing into a cultural icon and kept “Dallas” atop the ratings.
He admitted that the board members, being men of their word, had approved a secret plan to continue the payments.
“We made a considered judgment decision over several months that the commitments had been made and in the interest of the institution, the boys, their families,” Clements said.
SMU did not in fact play football again for two seasons and it went without a full complement of scholarships until 1992.
I planned to keep an eye on the television when SMU played Nevada on Thursday night in the Hawaii Bowl. It was SMU’s first postseason appearance in 25 years.
So, what does the return to prominence mean to the program?
“It proves there is life after death,” Athletic Director Steve Orsini said.
John Lombardi, now the president of Louisiana’s state university system, likened SMU’s death penalty to a nuclear bomb, saying it was the reason no other institution had been given the same punishment since the NCAA, in an effort to curtail violations by programs already on probation, passed its repeat violator rule in 1985.
“The results were so catastrophic that now we’ll do anything to avoid dropping another one,” Lombardi said not long after the NCAA came close to giving Alabama the death penalty when it found that boosters were paying players to go to Tuscaloosa.
“They were absolutely staring down the barrel of a gun,” Thomas Yeager, chairman of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, said of Alabama when penalties were announced in 2002. “These violations are some of the worst,most serious, that have ever occurred.”
Instead, the Crimson Tide was barred from postseason play for two years, lost scholarships and was placed on probation for five years. It will play Texas for the national title this season.
SMU’s football program, on the other hand, had been destroyed, and soon afterward so had the weakened Southwest Conference, which had generated tens of millions of dollars for its members since 1915.
The SMU football program has gone 62-163-3 since returning to the field in 1989, with only seven players getting drafted by NFL teams. In contrast, 28 Mustangs were drafted by NFL teams from 1980-1986.
Orsini is the university’s fifth athletic director over that time, and June Jones its fifth football coach.
There is another set of important numbers, however. The College Board scores of the first-year SMU undergraduate class have risen 97 points in 10 years, applications have more than doubled in eight years, and six new Ph.D. programs have been added. SMU’s endowment has doubled since 1995 to more than $1 billion.
“We refocused on what was really important, and that is academics,” said R. Gerald Turner, SMU’s president since 1995.
Still, Turner understands that sports matter. One of his first endeavors was to raise money to build the 32,000-seat Gerald J. Ford Stadium on campus.
“College sports should bepart of the community and should add to the college experience,” Turner said.
David Berst, the NCAA’s director of enforcement when SMU’s program was shut down, said he believes the college sports landscape has changed for the better.
“At the time, there was a culture of cheating in intercollegiate athletics that was fairly widespread in that part of the country,” said Berst, who is now the NCAA vice president for Division I. “They were competing with each other to gain an advantage without regard to the rules. There was the perception that people needed to cheat to compete.”
The NCAA is not as powerful as some of its critics like to think. It has limited resources and no subpoena power with which to fight institutional corruption. But by its actions against SMU, it did change college sports. University presidents and chancellors suddenly realized that serious infractions embarrassed their institutions, tarnishing their brand.
“Most of the momentum for reform came out of that era,” Turner said. “It returned the power back to presidents and academic administrators, and I think more institutions are obeying the rules.”
I believe my alma mater is now one of them. Better, I believe Turner when he says that my degree from SMU is more valuable than it was 25 years ago, and that my niece who is a freshman there is getting a first-class education at an institution with its priorities straight.
Sports, Pages 24 on 12/25/2009