It’s not an uncommon sight to see tour guides walking around campus with prospective students. If you asked the average campus tour guide, student leader or anyone that purports to have any coherent understanding of SMU’s athletic history about the plight of the football team, you invariably get the same answer: SMU football is bad because of the NCAA death penalty.
For the few of you reading this that don’t know what the death penalty was, it was an NCAA sanction for widespread institutional cheating that forbade SMU from fielding a football team in 1987. Accompanying the termination of its program, SMU was to lose its ability to play home games in 1988. Instead, the SMU administration decided to show its penance by canceling the 1988 season as well. So, there was no football team between the 1986 and 1989 season at SMU.
The effects of the death penalty are, at first glance, startling. SMU finished 2nd in the A.P. Poll in 1982 with an 11-0-1 record, and were ranked in the A.P. Top 20 (as it was then known) every year between 1980 and 1984. SMU between 1980 and 1986 was 61-19-1 (and 49-9-1 between 1980 and 1984). Their worst results were 6-5 records in 1985 and 1986. Since the death penalty, SMU has been 59-166-3, with its best record being 6-5 in 1997. SMU has been to no bowl games since 1984, and had the dubious distinction of being the fifth team in the history of major college football (since 1869) to go 0-12 in a given season in 2003.
Things might not be as simple as they seem, however. SMU has seemed to climb up from the cellar of Division 1-A many times over the Death Penalty years, but always managed to recede when it appeared to finally turn the corner and become a decent program again. The year after the death penalty, SMU finished 2-9, and had managed to climb up to a 5-6 record by 1992. They then fell back into the abyss of Division 1-A for 3 more years, but managed to post a 5-6 record the next year (after the dissolution of the Southwest Conference and SMU’s joining the much weaker Western Athletic Conference).
In 1997, as mentioned above, SMU had its first winning season of the post-death penalty years. In fact, SMU would likely have garnered a bowl invitation had they not managed to lose to previously winless TCU in the season finale. But again, after SMU seemed to have turned the corner, they managed to win successively less games over the next three years during a period when the strongest teams left to form the Mountain West Conference. Despite this, SMU continued to get worse. Under former coach Phil Bennett, SMU managed to hit the cellar in the WAC. Despite this, Bennett managed to get a 6-6 record in Conference USA only two years ago. Once again, despite SMU having many experienced players and a favorable schedule managed to go from a decent team on the verge of success to utter failure, following their .500 campaign with a 1-11 mark last season.
The fact of the matter is that SMU has had 19 years, five coaches and now its fourth clean slate since the imposition of the death penalty. SMU’s ability to gain success within the terms of each of those coaches shows that the death penalty’s effect was lost – if it was the death penalty’s fault, one would expect to see relatively consistent, horrendous results, instead of the stock market-esque ups and downs of the past several years.
The real problem is that coaches and players have been unable to find a firm foundation upon which to build. Students feel no allegiance to the team, only to their disparate social groupings across campus. The team needs the fans to rally around it when it begins to show signs of progress. While winning may be the only cure for bad attendance, when the team does start to win, as it surely will over the next few years, fans need to bother showing up to games rather than going to (fill in random fraternity party here).
We like blaming the death penalty because it shifts the focus off of us and onto the NCAA. “Texas and A&M cheated too – why weren’t they punished?”, etc. But not only has SMU shown signs of life post-execution, but other programs that were created after SMU’s program rebooted post-death penalty have thrived while ours has failed. The University of South Florida began their football program in 1997, and managed to reach a No. 2 ranking in Division 1-A last season. The University of Alabama at Birmingham started their football program in 1991, and over the intervening 17 years has managed to defeat LSU and secure a bowl invitation. Florida Atlantic started their football program in 1998, and not only went to the 1-AA semifinals, but has also after joining Division 1-A won a conference championship and went to a bowl game. All of these teams are in second tier Division 1-A conferences, same as SMU, and are situated in large cities. Probably the most illustrative case is Marshall, who had a real death penalty – a plane crash in 1970 that killed their entire football team. Yet, on the twenty-first anniversary of their plane crash, Marshall would be in the Division 1-AA national championship game and would go on to be the winningest 1-AA program of the decade, winning 114 games against only 25 losses. It would then go to Division 1-A in 1997, win several conference championships, and go undefeated in 1999, finishing ranked tenth in the nation. If Marshall can do this out of real tragedy, why has SMU failed time and again after a self-made penalty? It’s time for us to stop making excuses and start realizing the fault is our campus culture, not the sins of 1986.
John Jose is a senior finance and economics double major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]. Ben Hatch is a 2004 alumnus. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
