The death penalty or our reaction to it..the problem?

[Insane_Pony_Posse]

Everybody always says "no one else will ever get the death penalty"....but why not?

Was the death penalty that bad or was the way SMU handled it the main problem?

If a another school got the death penalty and didn't hire some whackjob like
Ken Pye that hated sports, wouldn't that school be able to have a much quicker
turn-around than SMU?

Sure the death penalty was horrible but wasn't our reaction to it maybe even
worse? Ok over-react to the DP for 5 years....but not 20 freaking years!

What if instead of Pye SMU had hired an Orsini that would have run a
clean program but not have been so extreme anti-sports trying to turn SMU
into some kind of Harvard? What if we had basically just stopped paying
players but not have implemented the Pye academic restrictions. Wouldn't
SMU have returned to at least a 500 type team much sooner?

I know the atmosphere at the time was one of shell-shock. And there was no
room for any talk of "hey lets take the punishment and then get right back
to work". But as Stallion has told us a million times wasn't the model the problem?
Wasn't the problem that SMU allowed this over-reaction model to continue for way
too long and that probably would not happen at places like Alabama, LSU, USC.
Those schools would not allow a few nutty academics control their sports destiny
like SMU did for so long.

Who is to say every school would react in the same dumba$$ way SMU did by putting
"a model" in place and keeping "a losing model" in place for as long as we did?

Ok so maybe no one else gets the death penalty...whatever...but was our reaction
to the death penalty maybe as much of the problem as the punishment itself?

[SMU89]

yes

[gostangs]

Bingo

we turned it over to the faculty. Hey - lets try it with REAL student athletes. Imaginary world, meet the real world. oops

[ALEX LIFESON]

That was maybe your most "SANE" post ever.

[Topper]

Insane, your comments are on the nose. I remember that even before we went on probation the first time there was a vocal faculty clique that wanted to do away with scholarship sports. They saw Emory University in Atlanta as our model. When the dp came down, there was chaos and this group seized the day. They filled the vacuum of power and installed Pye.

When the program finally came back, many of us invested in "cornerstone" season tickets. This meant that we shelled out thousands of dollars each for season tickets several years in advance at the old Ownby. The sales pitch was that we would re-build into a clean, competitive program. It turned out to be a joke. Pye and the anti-sports cabal gutted the program and hoped it would wither and die. Thanks to Gerald Ford and others, the administration finally realized that a competitive 1A program is key to the University's establishing an identity and loyalty among an influential base of supporters.

[Mexmustang]

It is amazing that the importance of a strong, competitive and clean Div I football program to the university is still being debated! Pye had a small, very small handful of financial supporters that helped save the university back then, but it split the donors and alumnia for the past twenty years. It is simply without explanation why some people still debate the issue and we continue to strive to be our own worst enemy!

[Statler]

Gerald J Ford saved SMU football. Without that stadium, I am convinced that by the mid-00's SMU would have given up. But since we had a 50 million dollar stadium at the corner of campus, it forced SMU to keep football (although the PB years were six more years until all decided to commit.

[ponyte]

Not doubt Ford and others are important in the continuation of football.

I tend to have a different take on who saved SMU football. Long before Ford, there was the Pye committee to end football. It wasn't named that and its official task was to 'evaluate' the feasibility of continuing D1A football. But everyone knew it was a front to end football at SMU.

Pye was the yahoo that eliminated the running pony on the basketball court to replace it with a seal featuring Dallas Hall. Nothing wrong with that except we are the Mustangs, not the Historical buildings. Pye did everything he could do embarrass the entire SMU community (alums, students, fans) by fielding a joke of a D1A football program. This wasn't the coaches or players fault of deficiency, it was Pye's clear attempt to eliminate football.

Pye's plan was to gut SMU of athletics. He made it harder for an athlete to get into SMU than a ballerina.

It wasn't just the Fords and Hunts of SMU that saved football, it was the common ordinary alumni. The outcry form a very large number of alumni and their determination to gut their donations to SMU if football was axed convinced Pye to back off.

SMU football was saved by thousands of alumni when the real threat of elimination raised its hideous head.

[ponyscott]

It was an obvious over correction that hampered this University for many years and RIP to Pye, but he was one man who really killed SMU Athletics for too long. USC's NCAA probation and reduced scholarship issues are the closest to a death penalty we have seen since to a major program, and it won't slow them down one bit. So the SMU Administration reaction was the problem, NOT entirely on the DP.

Good points and a damn good post insane_pony_posse!

[Longtime]

This was the one huge hole in "Pony Excess" as far as I'm concerned. It made it seem as if the DP was what kept SMU from being competitive for 20 years. That's a huge pile of B.S.

SMU kept SMU from being competitive with its overreaction to the DP. Of course, it's hard to say there can be an overreaction to the biggest scandal and biggest punishment in NCAA history, but long after all the "bad guys" were gone we continued to treat ourselves like criminals.

And you can rightfully point the finger at Pye, but our Board of Trustees (i.e. Pye's boss) stuck its head in the sand for decades, too. They were content with a crippled athletic department as long as there wasn't another major scandal.

Unfortunately, the Steve Malin incident cropped up - and right as we were trying to get into C-USA the first time along with TCU - which probably did a lot to keeping the shackles on athletics much longer than they should have been.

[Charleston Pony]

let's just all be relieved that SMU finally moved on after the "Pye Penalty"; I was living in Durham at the time and got to know one of the head coaches of one of Duke's men's programs. He told me when Pye was hired that we would struggle to ever have a competitive football program and that Pye was now in a position where he could do a lot of damage to our athletics programs. I think Pye was associated with Duke's law school at that time but was a vocal opponent of scholarships for athletes. I think he may have come to SMU hoping he could build an Ivy league caliber school with no athletic scholarships. I'm not sure where the scholarship cut off is...Division II or III? Who in the world would we have been competing against at that level? Hard to imagine

[ponyscott]

let's just all be relieved that SMU finally moved on after the "Pye Penalty"; I was living in Durham at the time and got to know one of the head coaches of one of Duke's men's programs. He told me when Pye was hired that we would struggle to ever have a competitive football program and that Pye was now in a position where he could do a lot of damage to our athletics programs. I think Pye was associated with Duke's law school at that time but was a vocal opponent of scholarships for athletes. I think he may have come to SMU hoping he could build an Ivy league caliber school with no athletic scholarships. I'm not sure where the scholarship cut off is...Division II or III? Who in the world would we have been competing against at that level? Hard to imagine

D-2 can have scholarships and D-3 no.....D-3 does give Grants, Academic (?) scholarships to get around it though.

[PonyKai]

Let's just all thank whoever you want to thank that he's gone, he was only able to do a finite amount of damage, and every day puts his 'vision' of what our university should be is that much farther in the rear-view mirror.

[NavyCrimson]

Well said - Insane!

[skyscraper]

That was maybe your most "SANE" post ever.

This.