SMU critics: Just put up or shut up

[Peruna_Ate_My_Rolex]

Ah, yes. The good ol' days.

"Like picking up a paycheck from work," an SMU football player told The Dallas Morning News once about playing football on the Hilltop.

Some players, presumably the best, got as much as $750 on scheduled visits to the athletic department or a booster's North Dallas business. Others earned as little as a $150. And if they had a telephone bill that was past due, a car in need of repair or an unwanted pregnancy on their hands, they could get a little extra financing for that, too.

That was SMU football, circa the early '80s, when Eric Dickerson and Craig James helped carry it to conference titles, lofty rankings, and eventually to the ignominious depths of scandal that has plunged the program into a seemingly bottomless pit.

Yet Dickerson garnered the gall the other day to lay blame for his alma mater's woes at the feet of athletic director Jim Copeland and football coach Phil Bennett and his staff. Dickerson did so while pointing out that he doesn't financially support his school's football program, either.

His ol' backfield mate, James, was more diplomatic in his criticism.

There is no question that Copeland, now in his 10th year running SMU sports, has a losing record at hiring coaches for the school's marquee sports, if you remove the unfortunately trivial statistics called graduation rates. Mike Cavan didn't work out as his first football hire and Bennett hasn't yet as Copeland's second. Mike Dement got the men's basketball program to one postseason tournament berth in nine years, the NIT, before Copeland chose Jimmy Tubbs to try his luck starting this season.

But this is for certain, too: Dickerson, and alums like him, of which SMU seems to have quite a few, are not part of the solution. They're quick to snipe and slow to support.

I recall that a former SMU track star who complained about the recent scrapping of the track team hadn't expressed his fanaticism in the form of a check to the program.

How's that saying go in Texas? All hat, no cattle? That would fit a lot of SMU's critics.

If the football players from SMU's illegitimate glory days want to help their old team, they could start by giving back all that cash they were pocketing that got SMU in so much trouble to begin with. Out of sheer guilt, they ought to be the first ones to volunteer to the athletic department for anything it needs. Maybe such gestures would help exorcise the curse their playing years undoubtedly left on the program.

But until they do, some quick-thinking entrepreneur should steal a page from P. Diddy's political action group Citizen Change, the one that produced those "Vote or Die" T-shirts, and print some T-shirts for sale at SMU. "Put Up or Shut Up," they could be emblazoned.

Copeland, Bennett, Tubbs and the other folks holed up at Moody Coliseum and Gerald J. Ford Stadium can't succeed alone. They need fans in the seats, win or lose. They need money for the basketball teams just to stay on the court with TCU and Rice, each of which recently built practice gyms that SMU doesn't have.

And the coaches need better players, especially if they are the offspring of alums such as James. But James, whose daughter attends his alma mater, wasn't so passionate about his old school that he made sure his son, Adam, a tight end recruit, accepted an invitation to Bennett's football camp. Charity still begins at home, doesn't it?

They don't, however, need money to pay the players anymore unless they want to put everyone out of their misery by doing away with SMU athletics for good. But sometimes you would swear you just heard some SMU fan more than intimate that.

[Hilltopper]

Good stuff!
Where's the rest of it?
Who wrote it?

[Peruna_Ate_My_Rolex]

Sorry, didn't realize it had cut it off.

Entering into a working relationship with their old school might cure some alums of their delusion that SMU athletics can get back to where they were. Those days are over.

SMU athletics never should've been as successful as they were in the '80s. That was the stuff of big schools. The only reason SMU was pulling off that feat was because the people running and funding its sports were so crooked.

It's become popular to say that the school's woes can't be blamed anymore on the Death Penalty that followed all that shameful corruption. Barry Switzer said back then that it would take the school 10 years to recover. What we know now, some 17 years later, is that it'll take as long as it'll take. This is uncharted water. Everyone connected with SMU should realize they're in the same boat