Man, I’m so happy today.
Genuinely happy, excited, proud, anxious, curious, appreciative, grateful and perhaps even still a bit shocked.
Yesterday my SMU Mustangs received an invite from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) to join its ranks as a full member. SMU promptly accepted and will begin play in the Fall of 2024. It’s been a long journey to get back to a major power conference (P5 as it were; P4 as it is; P3 as we’ll call it to make it sound better).
SMU for decades was a prominent player on the national college football scene — and college sports in general. Among their honors include a Heisman Trophy winner (Doak Walker in 1948), a shared national championship in 1982, 10 conference championships back in the old Southwest Conference, and a number of appearances in both major and minor Bowl games.
They’ve had All Americans and NFL Draft picks. Even a few NFL Hall of Famers (Forrest Gregg, Don Meredith, Raymond Berry). They are perhaps best known for the nickname “The Pony Express” which was coined when they had two of the best running backs in the country on the same team, Eric Dickerson and Craig James, from 1979 to 1982. That tandem was virtually unstoppable as SMU went undefeated in 1982 and won the prestigious Cotton Bowl right in their backyard in Dallas.
SMU also claims right to the toughest penalty ever handed down to a university by the NCAA: the so-called “Death Penalty”. It was due to a series of NCAA violations regarding payments to players in the 1980s. The reality is that most schools were doing it back then, at least the successful teams in the Southwest Conference. It wasn’t unusual for the top high school recruits to receive bags of money, cars, houses, etc. just for signing on the dotted line to play a particular school.
Although everyone was doing it, SMU was quite brash and brazen about it, blatantly disregarding the NCAA’s initial warnings and lesser penalties.
The Death Penalty resulted in no football program for the 1987 and 1988 seasons, losses of scholarships, and the forced distancing of SMU’s most ardent boosters (the big money donors) who funneled dollars from their oil, banks and real estate businesses to players and their families.
It crushed the program to the point where it was tough to recover. But they tried, and football eventually came back in 1989 with fewer 5-star recruits and a lot fewer wins.
The real death penalty, however, came when the Southwest Conference disbanded in 1996 and SMU was left without a home. The University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor left the conference to join the Big 8 Conference (thus forming the “Big 12”), and the remaining schools including SMU, TCU, Rice, and Houston had to scramble to find new conferences.
That started a long, dusty journey for SMU that saw them play in the WAC (Western Athletic Conference) for a few years, Conference USA for a few years, joined the Big East Conference for a few weeks before it disintegrated on them, and ultimately the American Athletic Conference which they’ve called home sine 2013.
And although they’ve had ups and downs, been to some bowl games during that span, had some stars along the way (Emmanuel Sanders, Courtland Sutton, Cole Beasley, Thomas Morestead) they have been considered 2nd-tier or even 3rd-tier in their own city. Texas and A&M have far more fans in the DFW Metroplex than SMU does, mainly because of the size of the schools vs SMU. But the reality is that casual fans don’t get excited to play Tulsa, UNC-Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, Memphis, etc. They want to see the big name schools and star players. And they want SMU to beat those teams.
Suffice to say, it’s been a long time coming.
And now we’re here.
SMU, thanks to the commitment and contributions of its administration and donors, has put itself into the conversation to once again be considered a “power program”. They have built and upgraded their athletic facilities on campus with more than $200 million the last 20 years, and they are currently completing a $100 million renovation to the football stadium (Ford Stadium). Their NIL program (“Name Image Likeness”), which is the current LEGAL way to compensate players, is top 10 in the entire country.
We’ve been paying players since before paying players was cool. For us, NIL just stands for “Now It’s Legal”.
Back to seriousness, it’s all with great thanks to some ultra-wealthy donors who simply love their SMU Mustangs. They support the school and the athletic department with financial contributions that are unfathomable to most of us. And their influence in the political, business, and academic sphere helps SMU stay top-of-mind when conference realignment comes around. It just wasn’t our turn yet.
This time we weren’t to be denied.
David Miller, Bill Armstrong, President George W. Bush (whose wife, Laura, is an SMU alum) and many others all played a role in putting SMU in a position to be considered a program worth inviting to a “Power 5” Conference.
Earlier this year we thought it might be the PAC12, but in an unforeseen and unprecedented series of events that century-old Conference collapsed before our very eyes. Its members dispersed elsewhere.
Just when we thought it was going to be a longer wait, talks with the ACC intensified. It certainly helped SMU that two other major college and sports brands, Stanford and Cal, were both out there looking for new homes as well.
And finally the call came shortly after 7am Central time on Friday September 1st, 2023. The ACC’s Presidents voted 12-3 to invite SMU, Stanford and Cal to join the Conference.
It wasn’t without drama, however, as 12 was the minimum number of votes needed to approve an invite. Two weeks ago, only 11 schools were considered “yes” votes. Clemson, Florida State, North Carolina and NC State were all “no” votes in an informal straw poll.
Those schools are considered the conference “malcontents” because they are all seeking more money than they currently receive from the ACC, arguing that their brands and on-field/on-court success brings in the most money. It’s been a back-and-forth duel between them and the conference commissioner for a couple years now.
The challenge for these schools is that they signed a contract known as a “Grant of Rights” or “GoR” that hands over the rights to all of their home game revenue — including the very valuable TV revenue — to the ACC Conference until 2036.
They received a sweetheart of a deal when the contract was first signed, but now they feel like they deserve more when compared to what other big-brand schools in other conferences are receiving. So why not leave? Because the GoR is so tight it would cost them potentially more than $500 million in penalties and fees. That’s a tough pill to swallow just to make $20 million more per season. It will take a long time to recoup that investment, so it makes sense to wait until that $500M amount goes down a little more each year, and then pull the trigger down the road.
But business is business and all things are negotiable, and the four holdout schools wanted to find ways to extract more money in exchange for a “yes” vote. Or they wanted a lesser penalty for leaving early. After some intense negotiations where SMU, Stanford, and Cal all ultimately agreed to forego massive portions of the ACC’s TV revenue for 7-9 years (SMU foregoing 100% of the payout and Cal/Stanford foregoing as much as 60-70%).
That money — potentially $70 million — will go into a pool of cash that will be distributed among the existing 15 ACC members. Some will be an even, automatic payment and some will be paid based on performance, giving the Clemsons, Florida States, and UNCs of the group a chance to get more money.
As to the question of “how does SMU, Stanford and Cal make money to support its programs?”, well, they will be dipping into savings and donors to supplement whatever small income they do receive from the ACC. For SMU, honestly, they’ve already secured (reportedly) enough money from a small group of donors to keep the program afloat. It’s great to have billionaire friends. Stanford and Cal have some too. I’m sure they will be fine.
So which school flipped their vote from “no” to “yes”? It’s reported that it was NC State. And it makes sense because Clemson, Florida State and UNC are all likely to have landing spots in the prestigious BIG 10 or SEC Conferences if they choose to move in the future. NC State has no such guarantee or even likelihood. This was about survival for them.
Now the ACC Conference will have 18 members, although Notre Dame remains “Independent” in football. This ensures they will still have a viable number of schools to compete even if 3, 4 or even 8 schools were to leave and play somewhere else.
This round of expansion and realignment was quite literally about survival for the ACC.
The best article that sums up the rollercoaster journey of the ACC’s expansion is this one by Ross Dellenger with Yahoo! Sports. It’s worth a read.
And, of course, the outstanding Insider coverage by Billy Embody at On3 Network’s “On The Pony Express” site, which has become a close-knit group of super fans who ride the daily ups and downs like it were our last breath.
No matter how we got here, I’m excited that SMU is part of it.
The ACC, in addition to being an outstanding conference athletically with more recent national championships than any other conference, is also an absolute powerhouse of academic institutions. Schools such as Duke, North Carolina, Virginia, Boston College, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest are all highly ranked for academics. Pretty much all the schools are, actually. Except maybe Louisville. But the great thing about joining a conference like the ACC is that SMU now has a chance to improve its own academic rankings and standings because of who it’s associating with. The applicant pool should increase and improve simply because of the added exposure in new markets on the east coast.
It’s a win-win all around. The ACC gets more stability at a time when conferences are poaching schools from coast to coast, the ACC member schools get millions of dollars in extra revenue, and SMU, Stanford and Cal have a new place to compete and call home for the foreseeable future.
Yep, it’s a great day to be a Mustang.
