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

[ThadFilms]

My $.02... Think about the situation. You are probably the most scrutinized university in the land. You have just gotten the most severe penalty in the history of the game. To not blame the penalty is silly. The penalty caused the reaction.

Yes the reaction caused so many years of sucking... But c'mon, think about it? Universities, their primary mission is to educate, not field a national championship caliber football team.

When punished thusly, with the media's microscope so thoroughly on you, I find it hard to believe any other academic institution would behave any differently. Yes it was an over-reaction... But everything was overdone back then. "We have the death penalty to prove it." - Eric Dickerson

You have got to show everyone that the educators are back in control, because everyone is looking at you and waiting to pounce.

It's a move I hate and really, really affected my life in a negative way... But to keep blaming Pye, etc. is silly. We just need to move on. We had impossible circumstances and our school tried to figure out the best way to move on.

Yes the ghosts of the DP still haunt some in our admin. I hope the film that I was a small part of making helps them close that door.

[EastStang]

Two points. Pye was an academic, but also we had the Methodist Church involved at that point as well. The same church that wanted to take "Onward Christian Soldiers" out of the hymn book as too militaristic. They did not want anymore scandals. It hurt the church's reputation. Pye thought that the concept of the student athlete was a viable one and wanted to try it. The problem was that once it showed that it did not work, and Forrest Gregg told him it would not work, he stayed the course and after he left, the powers that be, did not immediately dismantle it. Whether they bought into Pye's dream or just hated football would be the source of another interesting documentary. Either way, we were in the desert for a generation.

[Topper]

Yes the ghosts of the DP still haunt some in our admin. I hope the film that I was a small part of making helps them close that door.[/quote]

The film was fantastic. I thought it would be too painful to watch, but I was immediately hooked. And I think the message that this problem is still simmering around the country is not only timely, but important to everyone who loves this very poorly organized sport that we love so much.

[ponyboy]

The whole NCAA football amateur setup is a recipe for disaster. And there's no easy answer even for a free marketeer. Wonder what Milton Friedman would have said?

[Dwan]

DP sent us back 5 years
Break up of SWC set us back 5 years
Our reaction to the DP set us back 10 years

[lwjr]

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?

IPP,

Thank you for saying that. The death penalty was devastating but the way the SMU Administration decided to handle the situation in the next two decades help set the program back as much as the NCAA DP ever did.

BEAT ARMY!!!!

[Dwan]

The DP also killed the basketball program. In comes Pye who wont admit Larry Johnson. LJ wanted to go to SMU bad. Our BBall program looks much different today it LJ plays for the ponies.

[Treadway21]

Great point Dwan. Except we were able to get rid of Bliss - though I must admit I was a bliss fan while he was here.

[SoCal_Pony]

In defense of Pye, who I am no fan of, I think the problem wasn't only FB. He began investigating the BB program under Bliss and realized that 'illegality' extended beyond FB. That had to contribute to the extreme pendulum swing.

I thought this was a funny story at the time. During that winter as we were all awaiting the punishment phase from the NCAA, I attended an SMU BB game at Moody. Bought my midcourt seats from an SMU FB player. These were premium season ticket holder seats. He was out there before game-time hawking them in front of the main entrance. It was wrong on so many levels that I quickly purchased them with little negotiation on my part.

One other observation from that year. Right after all the crap hit the fan, SMU went to Lubbock and defeated a pretty good RedRaider team to ensure a winning season. This was after the Stanley mess went public. I was very proud of the Ponies that day, they showed a lot of heart.

[Dwan]

Legend has it that after the DP, the NCAA turned up a bunch of things on the BB program that were worse than what the football program was doing. The NCAA went to SMU and said, look, we are not going to hit the BB program as well, but clean it up and they fired Bliss.

[orguy]

Pye did lots of damage. Ended up making SMU a laughingstock academically. Comparing SMU to Rice while at that time our SAT's were plummeting under his tutelage. The guy was an idiot.

Clemments (with his BIble and love of Karl Rove), RH and Pye. Great people.

Guys like Lamar Hunt, Turner, Ford etc saved SMU.

[rich59]

SMU should have been back competitively much faster than it was. The only excuse for the problem at SMU is that it shows what happens when you let the inmates run the institution. Probably the strongest athletic college program is down in Austin. If you let the professors down there and some of the administrators run everything they could bring the athletic department to it's knees in five years or less.

[Longtime]

It wasn't just the football and basketball program back then. I believe our track and field program had some shady things going on, too.

Just for the record, Bliss wasn't fired. We won the SWC and went to the NCAA tournament the next year - beating Notre Dame on St. Patrick's Day and then losing to Duke. Bliss soon got an offer from New Mexico and was out the door.

Bliss wasn't fired, but he wouldn't have lasted much longer under intense scrutiny. And his top assistant, John Underwood, is now the Big 12 assistant commissioner in charge of basketball. The Big 12 commissioner, Dan Beebe, was one of the NCAA investigators of SMU.

The Big 12 is basically run by two guys who were on opposite sides of SMU's NCAA investigations back in the 1980s. Strange bedfellows.