Black Sunday

[PlanoStang]

No, damn the cheaters at SMU in the '80s. And although the death penalty was the catalyst, nobody else would have done what Pye did and tried to stay in Div 1.

Yep. And, although a cheerleader like myself hates to admit it, another point needs to be made. Except for the cheating, we had been a mediocre player in a major conference for decades. Since the breakup of the SWC, we've been a mediocre player in second tier conferences. So the fall has not been as far as advertised by some on this board.

Back to cheerleader mode. There is plenty of reason for optimism with Orsini at the helm. And I cannot wait to see what Willis is able to do next year.

Decades NOT

It was about 16 years since we won the SWC 2 years in a row during the
Doak Walker/ Kyle Rote years till we won it again under Hayden Fry in
66. Much expections etc. in between during the All-America QB Don
Meredith years

My theory is the then lowly to average Whorns learned to cheat in the
early 60s under the not so royal guy who learned to cheat as an
assistant at the Oh U cheater factory.

[jtstang]

A fight in court against the NCAA would have been a loser, and we got what we deserved from thumping the big bully NCAA on the nose so many times before. And I don't care what everybody else was doing, I only went to SMU.

[PlanoStang]

A fight in court against the NCAA would have been a loser, and we got what we deserved from thumping the big bully NCAA on the nose so many times before. And I don't care what everybody else was doing, I only went to SMU.

That's OBVIOUS

Your heart lies with some childhood team. Maybe your Dad's college


Or, maybe you just want SMU to abandon Div. IA athletics

[ponyboy]

Decades NOT

It was about 16 years since we won the SWC 2 years in a row during the Doak Walker/ Kyle Rote years till we won it again under Hayden Fry in 66.

Our total win percentage from 1915 through 1979 is 52.1%. Sounds like mediocrity for decades to me. Run some queries if you want here: http://football.stassen.com/records/

Look, I love SMU football and hate posting this kind of stuff. But we've been an average upper level program that's now an average mid level. Let's follow Orsini's lead and get to where we're consistent Top 25. He's right: We certainly have a lot to offer in our city, our stadium, and facilities. GO SMU!

[Stallion]

Blah! Blah! Blah! Only you could turn SMU's abysmal record over the last 18 years into a positive. Here's the correct comparison-SMU is 15-74-2 against former SWC teams for a 16% winning percentage, SMU is 11-42-1 against the LOWER elechelon of the former SWC(Rice, TCU, Baylor, UH) for a 20% winning percentage, 1-20 on the road against former SWC cupcakes Baylor, Rice and TCU for a 4.5% winning percentage and is the only school that hasn't been to a bowl since the breakup of the SWC. I miss mediocrity.

[ponyboy]

Anything close to glory years for SMU football all but ended in 19-frickin-49! Up to that point, we had won 60% of our games. That puts us right at about #40 for the period of 1915 to 1949 for teams from major conferences. Texas, TCU, A&M and Tech were above us for that period. Below us were Baylor, Rice and Arkansas.

From 1950 to 1979, we had a 43% win percentage. 43%. We're at 35% since joining the ranks of the mid-levels in 1996. But I'm being generous calling either period -- major conference or mid level -- mediocre. Mediocre is 50%.

I agree: I'll take mediocre right now. Which is what we got with last season's 6-6.

Unless you're using the false glory years of 1980-1984 as your point of reference, our fall has not been nearly as far as advertised.

[Stallion]

Look Ponyboy-its a Rainbow!!! Run Ponyboy Run!!!

[mrydel]

Our fall is not measured in wins and losses. If anyone on this board does not recognize the difference between the old SWC and the current CUSA is too young to remember those days.

[smupony94]

From the Austin American Wasteman

SMU's death penalty: 'Let's not kid ourselves, it was devastating'
Twenty years later, former SWC power still trying to pick up the pieces from NCAA penalty
Click-2-Listen
Monday, February 26, 2007

There is no discernible marker on the Hilltop to commemorate the event, but if there were at the small, Methodist private school in the heart of Dallas, it would read along the following lines:

Here lies the Southern Methodist football program. Born 1915. Died 1987.


2005 DALLAS MORNING NEWS

(enlarge photo)
Since sitting out the 1987 season due to NCAA infractions, the SMU football program has shown only modest signs of recovery. Last season's team finished 6-6 under coach Phil Bennett.


MORE KIRK BOHLS

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Harrington commemorated parents' death by starting his life over
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Kirk's Super Bowl blog



Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the last time SMU had a strong football program. It was a de facto professional football operation back then.

This wayward program in the long-defunct Southwest Conference was so out of control that even a sitting state governor who served on the school's board of trustees OK'd payments to players out of a booster-directed slush fund.

Football was canceled for one season in 1987, and the team was banned from a bowl game and all television appearances. The school added a second year on its own because of harsh sanctions that included the loss of 60 scholarships over four years.

With a single winning season in the last 20 years, SMU's program is far from thriving now. It averaged fewer than 16,000 fans last fall in its 32,000-seat on-campus stadium. Until last December, Rice hadn't been to a bowl game since 1961 and now has been to a postseason game more recently than SMU, whose last bowl game was 1984.

The SMU program has shown very modest signs of recovery, with last season's 6-6 team under competent and compassionate coach Phil Bennett. Only in the last three years has the school administration relaxed some of its academic standards to help the Mustangs try to gain their footing.

But SMU reaped what it had sowed.

On that day two decades ago, the NCAA hammer came down [deleted] one of the dirtiest operations in college football history and handed out the first — and only — death penalty.

The NCAA has never used that ultimate pejorative term in describing the penalty. It calls it a punishment for serious repeat offenders, and SMU certainly qualified with its seventh major infraction, tying for the most ever.

And with that decision on Feb. 25, 1987, the NCAA cleaned up cheating in college forever, right?

Hardly.

It didn't, although some think cheating is on a downswing, partly because of so many suspicious eyes from a prying Internet and investigative reporters. But be careful about jumping to any conclusions that big-time college sports has completely reformed itself.

"I don't think there's any doubt it had an effect," Bennett said Saturday. "It made them think twice about cheating. Before, people would do what it took, figuring it'd only get probation for a year or two. It was a way of life back then. But boosters cannot be involved now. That was a direct result of what was happening."

And university presidents got involved.

Interestingly enough, current SMU president R. Gerald Turner helped chair the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and championed ground-breaking moves, such as certifying student-athletes academically and attempting to better monitor college sports careening out of control.

"It got the attention of the presidents," said David Berst, the NCAA vice president for Division I. "The presidents moved from recognizing where they might see headlines detrimental to their institutions' mission to now running the NCAA. They are in charge, but they weren't (before SMU)."

Berst knows a little something about the SMU case. In 1987, he was the lead investigator during his 25-year tour of duty with the NCAA's enforcement arm.

Not that he remembers everything about that dark February day. He fainted before reading the verdict at the Dallas press conference, a victim of the flu and stress.

"It just adds to the legend," he said last week.

For Bennett — one of four Mustang head coaches in the last 20 years — the punishment reduced SMU to an athletic program that takes its satisfaction in a recent perfect football players' graduation rate and the highest standing among its Conference USA brethren for overall athletic success, almost entirely in non-revenue sports.

Football? It's had only a 6-5 record in 1997 to brag about. SMU has played in three conferences during that span and couldn't win under NFL coaches Forrest Gregg and Tom Rossley. In football, the Mustangs have become irrelevant, the worst thing you can say about a program.

"I'd compare it to when we dropped the nuclear bomb," Bennett said. "Nobody knew the devastation it would cause. Let's not kid ourselves, it was devastating. And we became our own worst enemy. We were so embarrassed, we made it harder (to recover) than it needed to be."

In truth, reckless cheating probably has dropped off somewhat. Seven schools are currently in NCAA jail for football improprieties — even BCS championship finalist Ohio State — and another seven were hit with sanctions for basketball indiscretions.

But college sports won't be scrubbed clean so long as there is the overzealous passion of fans and the equally unchecked drive to win at all costs.

Have we forgotten Baylor's sordid tale in which a basketball player was murdered by a teammate, and the Bears' disgraced coach lost his job and reputation simultaneously when he hatched an elaborate cover-up plan to smear the deceased (besides illegally paying a player's tuition and providing free airline tickets)?

The coach? Dave Bliss. The same Dave Bliss who was in charge of basketball at SMU and left shortly after football's demise — some think, with a posse sniffing at his trail.

Didn't exactly learn a lesson, did he? Others might have, but we still learn of wholesale academic fraud at Minnesota and point-shaving scandals in basketball. Michigan's Fab Five were paid by a fabulously unethical booster.

Remember the $1,000 spilling out of an Emery delivery package to a recruit from Kentucky, derailing coach Eddie Sutton's regime? That happened in 1988, the first year after SMU was banned from playing football.

Didn't St. Bonaventure admit a junior-college basketball transfer on the merit of a welding certificate? What of the illicit correspondence courses from the Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God, which prompted the NCAA to investigate more than 40 athletic departments in the 1990s? Does anyone walk the straight and narrow, or is the obsession with winning too tempting?

"Back then, I said about 10 percent of schools involved in high-pressure programs might be involved in intentional violations," Berst said. "I don't know how much that has changed."

Probably not much. It's difficult to imagine a more morally bankrupt situation than Baylor's basketball excesses, which made the Waco school eligible for the ultimate sanction. But the Bears escaped the death penalty. Berst sees no reluctance on the NCAA's part to dole out the death penalty to a major program, but most are skeptical.

"They never will" issue a death penalty again, Bennett said. "There have been a lot of worse things that have happened, and they didn't. They never will."

[ponyboy]

Our fall is not measured in wins and losses. If anyone on this board does not recognize the difference between the old SWC and the current CUSA is too young to remember those days.

Understood completely, mrydel. My point is that we were mediocre at best in the SWC from the time Doak and Kyle Rote won conference for the second year in a row in 1949 to the brink of the 1980's, winning only 42% of our games in that 30 year period. And we've won 35% of our games while members of the WAC and CUSA. So we were a mostly bad team in a major conference and now we're a mostly bad team in a mid-major. A fall? Absolutely. But not a fall from the status of perennial powerhouse to where we are now. Although it makes much more interesting copy, 1980-1984 is not who we are.

[Stallion]

"In football, the Mustangs have become irrelevant, the worst thing you can say about a program."

These newspaper guys have got to stop stealing my lines

[EastStang]

The minute we were dumped by the SWC, we became irrelevent. Just another mid-major program in another mid-major conference. Sure TCU has had some great years, but they're still just another mid-major team. Right now if we were to get up to a winning record next year and for several years thereafter, that would help.

[Charleston Pony]

[quote="EastStang"]The minute we were dumped by the SWC, we became irrelevent. Just another mid-major program in another mid-major conference. Sure TCU has had some great years, but they're still just another mid-major team.

So true. TCU has had a great run and has been in the Top 25 polls most of those years, but most people I know in this part of the country (SEC and ACC fans) would tell you TCU plays in the WAC. If you aren't BCS or the Cinderella of the Year (Boise St this past year), you are irrelevant.

Can we AT LEAST get to the same level TCU is at???