Twenty years ago SMU football players took the field for the first time in two years. The reason for their two-year absence: the Death Penalty.
The pay-for-play scandal led to SMU receiving the harshest penalty given by the NCAA, the Death Penalty, effectively “killing” the football program for two seasons.
In 1986 investigations by WFAA and The Dallas Morning News revealed football players were paid through a slush fund. An investigation by the NCAA found that SMU boosters paid 13 players a total of $61,000.
In February 1987, Lonnie Kliever, a SMU religious studies professor, sent the NCAA a report saying that SMU was in fact paying players. Nineteen days later the NCAA voted to cancel SMU’s 1987 season. In addition, the NCAA allowed SMU to play only seven games in 1988, none at home.
“It brought the university a name that none of us wanted to be associated with,” Dr. Jim Hopkins, an SMU history professor, said.
Athletic Director Dudley Parker said in a Chicago Sun-Times story that, “unless we can really have a team [instead of] a bunch of youngsters [who] aren’t capable of competing,” SMU would not play any games in 1988 either.
At the time, SMU was a member of the Southwest Conference along with schools like Texas, Texas A&M, Arkansas and others. The Mustangs were not the only team in the conference to have issues with the NCAA. Several other teams had been placed on probation or given sanctions by the NCAA.
“There was some feeling among the faculty members that it was a rather harsh penalty, and while SMU may have deserved it, there were others that we knew perfectly well who deserved it,” said Peter Winship, the James Cleo Thompson Sr. Trustee professor in the SMU Law School and president of the Faculty Senate 1987-88.
Now, 20 seasons later, the Mustangs have won only 59 of 226 games, a winning percentage of 26.1 percent. The team has had just one winning season going 6-5 in 1997. SMU has not played in a bowl game since the 1984 Aloha Bowl.
“Since my mom attended SMU, I grew up going to games and we’d always lose, I never understood why as a kid,” Andrew Conwell, a sophomore marketing major and member of The Union, said. “I learned of [the death penalty] from my parents and now my roommate and I are SMU fans and we talk about it a lot.”
June Jones came to SMU in 2008, carrying a price tag of over $2 million, to be the savior of the demoralized program.
With Jones came the hope of a similar turnaround he performed at Hawaii taking a 0-12 team to a bowl game the following year. It did not happen. In 2008, the Mustangs won just one game.
“You can’t say that we have ‘come back,’ but as an institution we are wiser. I think what we went through was a lesson to universities across this country,” Hopkins said.
SMU had been on thin ice with both the NCAA and the SWC for several years. Between 1974 and 1985, the NCAA sanctioned SMU five times. Just two years before receiving the Death Penalty, SMU was banned from bowl games in 1985 and ’86, and banned from televised games in 1986. When the incident report came out in 1987 there was no way for SMU to get out of it again.
“We had very little to do with the sanction, it just happened,” Winship said.
The scandal included members of the coaching staff, athletic department and even the board of governors. Bill Clements, then chairman of the board and governor of Texas had approved the payment of players along with other members of the board.
“The members of the board who said these payments were being made felt they had a kind of obligation to those who were presently here,” Hopkins said. “In a kind of bizarre way it was a kind of manifestation of a honorable business ethic that was totally inappropriate to the university.”
With Hunt taking over the Board of Governors and A. Kenneth Pye named SMU’s new president, the board shifted from a business focus to an academic focus.
“It was an infinitely healthier environment that broke out of the ‘old boys network’ that brought in diversity of gender, background,” Hopkins said.
By the spring of 1988, SMU had a new head coach, athletic director, chairman of the board and president.
The Mustangs hired alumnus and former NFL player Forrest Gregg to replace Bobby Collins as head coach. Dudley Parker and later Doug Single replaced Bob Hitch as athletic director. Ray Hunt replaced Clements as chairman of the board. Pye replaced L. Donald Shields as the university’s president.
“There was a seismic shift in the leadership in the board of trustees when [Clements] left and [Edwin] Cox stepped aside and Ray Hunt took over. It was a generational shift that coincided with much of what was happening around campus,” Winship said. “Most of us expected, and certainly in terms of the faculty, it was a closing of the era, that it had gotten out of hand.”
The Mustangs returned to the Southwest Conference, but when it dissolved in 1996, SMU joined the Western Athletic Conference, which has far less national visibility. In 2005 SMU joined Conference USA.
SMU couldn’t compete well enough to join the Big XII or the SEC like other SWC teams did, but by joining the WAC and C-USA the Mustangs were no longer on the national level they were in the 80s.
“The problem of course was one of conference; we knew we could no longer be part of the Southwest Conference. While we were paying our players we were competing with [Texas] and beating them, we were virtually beating everyone. We all knew that we were up for grabs,” Winship said.
Winship added that there was even talk of SMU joining a more “academic conference” with teams such as the University of Chicago and Emory. That move would have placed SMU football in Division III, something Winship said the students, faculty and alumni would not have accepted.
“At that time they asked the student representatives on the finance committee, and they reported that the students they talked with said they would not come to SMU if there was not a top level athletic program, and in particular football,” Winship said.
The Athletic Department declined to comment on the story.
The NCAA has not given any Division I school the Death Penalty since SMU in 1987, even though 29 schools have committed violations that make them eligible to receive the penalty.
“Unfortunately for us we were the ones that were caught, and [the NCAA] saw the severity of their actions and they don’t want to hurt another college’s or university’s athletic program like SMU’s was,” Conwell said. “I don’t think they ever will [give the Death Penalty again].”
SMU no longer pays its players, but the preoccupation with money and winning remains strong. After the dismal 2008 football season, Jones kicked nine players off the team for allegedly violating disciplinary rules. All were reserves. Four appealed the decision. The University Judicial Council ruled in favor of the four and reinstated their scholarships but did not order Jones to put them on the team.
