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After being popped by the NCAA, SMU cleaned up its act, like really cleaned up by employing Ivy-ish academic standards while still trying to compete in a Southwest Conference where everybody had allegedly been cheating and everybody was relieved not to have been caught too.

“I can’t say that we didn’t get what was coming our way,” former Pony turned ESPN analyst Craig James told The Associated Press a couple of weeks ago, still blithely maintaining his innocence in and ignorance of any wrongdoing.

It is a lie, or at very best a gross act of Rogers Clemens-esque “misremembering.” James and Eric Dickerson and The Pony Express did not get what was coming to them. They were long gone by the time what was coming to them finally showed up in Dallas, onto jobs in the NFL and as color commentators, able to giggle and demur about the excess.

Not so for Mike Romo.

He got what was coming their way — his knees getting their punishment, his seasons marked by their hubris, his college football experience defined by their excess.