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DALLAS — Early Friday morning, SMU received a phone call decades in the making, a lifeline from the ACC offering them a return to the upper echelons of college football.
It was a proud day for the Mustangs, with an afternoon celebration in the school’s indoor practice facility. Confetti fell from the sky. The pep band played “Great Balls of Fire” as boosters mingled, shared hugs and high-fives nearly 40 years after becoming one of the most vilified college football programs in college football history.
“We’re finally back where we belong,” said David Miller, the chairman of SMU’s board of trustees, receiving a standing ovation.
The NCAA’s 1987 “death penalty” for repeated recruiting violations wrecked the football program, as the strings holding together the Southwest Conference started to fray. After football returned to SMU in 1989, the Mustangs won just 13 games over the final seven years of the SWC. In 1995, when the new Big 12 merged four teams from the SWC — Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor — with the Big 8, SMU was left to start over again. And again (in the WAC) and again (in Conference USA) and again (in the Big East, which didn’t materialize and turned into the American).
A proud program that finished in the top 10 three times between 1981 and 1984, including a No. 2 finish in 1982, hasn’t finished a single season in the AP rankings since then.
And yet, the Mustangs willed themselves into the ACC. Despite its modest enrollment (7,056 undergrads in fall 2022), a decades-long lack of high-level football success, and a frustrating lack of fan support, SMU’s athletics ambition is still bigger’n Dallas, as the Texas saying goes.
They did it by making the ACC a deal it couldn’t resist: They’d join the conference without taking any…
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