Posted on: Saturday, October 6, 2001
SMU still paying for past transgressions
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
DALLAS — The reminders of the storied past in Southern Methodist University football are all around you here, where the University of Hawai'i plays today.
It is hard to go very far around the sprawling athletic complexes or, indeed, most anywhere on the 163-acre campus without being confronted by displays, photos and glass-encased memorabilia that recall the football tradition at a school that produced Raymond Berry, Eric Dickerson, Jerry Levias, Kyle Rote, Ray Schoenke and Doak Walker, and introduced the "Pony Express."
Yet for for all its rich past, there is something that took place during the 1987-1988 seasons that still hangs over this program like a dark cloud.
It is the so-called NCAA-rendered "death penalty" that not only continues to shape Mustang football, the only college football program to receive the sanction, but weigh it down even today.
"Without the 'death penalty' I think we'd still be a top (25) program," said linebacker Vic Viloria, the Western Athletic Conference's leading tackler last season. "That really set the program back."
Before the NCAA padlocked SMU football in 1987 for repeated and serious rules violations including overzealous boosters paying players, the Mustangs had run off a string of seven consecutive winning seasons including four of 10 wins or more.
Since the reinstatement of football on the hilltop in 1989, there has been but one winning season (6-5 in 1997) in 12 years and that has come to be looked upon as more of an aberration than anything else.
Nor is their much belief that the 0-3 team the Warriors play this morning will reverse the trend anytime soon.
The SMU scandal and others involving Southwest Conference teams were a factor in the eventual breakup of the conference. It is a dissolution that hit SMU hard, resulting in the Mustangs being bypassed by the Big-12 and, after joining the WAC in 1996, also being snubbed by the Mountain West and Conference USA.
"Your top players in Texas want to go to Texas or Texas A&M or, if they can't, they want to play against them, and those are the teams your fans want to see, too," said SMU coach Mike Cavan. "With them (UT and A&M) in the Big 12, that's lot harder now and it has had an impact not only on recruiting but attendance."
On campus, the "death penalty" forced a re-examination of athletics and gave a stronger hand to the faculty which led the fight for more rigorous admission standards, including a minimum 950 SAT score, 130 points above the NCAA minimum.
Thirteen years after SMU crawled out of the NCAA's dog house, the effects still linger for all to see.
"When other schools saw what happened to us, I think they think a little harder about breaking the rules," Viloria said.
If that is true, maybe the SMU experience hasn't been a complete loss.
