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“What really strikes fear in Saban's heart is what will happen to his program if the sleeping giant in the University Park suburb of Dallas wakes up. If Saban is tossing his cookies at the thought of the damage boosters at Texas A&M and Texas have done, wait until those boosters' bosses who support SMU start throwing money around.”
— Sports Illustrated

That is why we got shut down by ncaa. Now, it is legal and we already know how to do it. Just win and do it legally.

Go Mustangs and now... pony up to the DTX collective.

Do we get reparations. We were truly ahead of our time.

Hope this is true!!!

I am not a BMD, so maybe I’m completely wrong, but I don’t think we have the rich alumni football fans like we used to.

Seems like yes, in the early 80s, nobody, even the big state schools with big alumni bases, could outspend SMU.

Nowadays, even if we got good and into a big conference, I don’t think we have more rich alums interested in blowing huge sums on the football team than do the other regional P5 schools.

Assume we are number 1 for G5 NIL money.

Nobody is beating the Aggies for NIL money. They have it and want to spend it on football.

I think a lot of it was SWC egos. You didn't want to get crap at the local Chamber of Commerce meeting from Aggie or Whorn alums, so you paid some scratch to get better players than they had. We'll see from here on out.

IMO we ran off most of the BMDs from the Pony Express days. We now have very few who will belly up and make sure we move to a better conference.

I believe that cougar high got invited to the big xx due to the efforts of Tilman Fertitta. I am sure he harassed, cajoled, and pressured every person involved in that conference expansion, In fact I would not be surprised if a little payola was involved. At least he got results, much better than crickets.

That's the story I heard. I also heard he pissed off everyone in Big XX with his incessant whining in the first round of conference reshuffling. So I was a little surprised that the whining paid off in round 2. I guess money can't buy you love, but it can invite you to the party.

PNW_Stang wrote:I am not a BMD, so maybe I’m completely wrong, but I don’t think we have the rich alumni football fans like we used to.

There's probably some truth in this; also, a lot more of the perceived big money in Dallas is from newer arrivals (Mark Cuban, Ken Fisher, Kelcy Warren, etc.) and not connected with the SMU of old.

The competition will be much tougher this time around:

https://www.espn.com/college-football/s ... tador-club

We had competition back then, TCU (which got a watered down version of the death penalty), Aggies who should have gotten the death penalty, UT who was cheating, but kept turning in opponents and had protection on the NCAA infractions committee, UH. Some rumors even Baylor was cheating. Arkansas under Saint Frank allegedly did not cheat, but I never believed that. Tech no rumors back then of cheating. Alabama, Miami, Pitt all had recruiting scandals back then.

Regarding Arkansas, I knew guys who were athletes there who were receiving pay, in one form or another.

when the proverbial poop was hitting the fan during the SWC days and schools were getting sanctioned for cheating, i remember Spike Dykes (yeah that Dykes) gave one of the few honest assessments of the day.

He said Tech wouldn’t get caught in the cheating scandal that the big schools were. The reason? Tech didn’t have the resources.

They have 25 k per player per year now.

The NCAA is a corrupt organization and akin to a cartel. I'm surprised there are no legal minds in the U.S. that have not stopped the cartel-like behavior of college athletics. How in the world is it possible for some schools to be allowed access to certain income streams, and not others, and it's not market-based. If it were market based, you wouldn't see some of the schools associated with current P5 programs. It's all political, and it's all based on the large state schools, which by the way get funded by us taxpayers. Everyone should have access to the same market, and if certain schools can get more income, than so be it, but don't block schools from competing fairly unless they get invited to the party by other schools that have played dirty for decades.