Wednesday Aug. 23, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
SMU resurrects program The new football team is green but gung-ho
The Associated Press
DALLAS — The veteran coach ran a bunch of greenhorn freshmen through practices and created a football team that one local writer suggested had as much chance of success "as a pollow has in a lake of nitric acid."
That was 1915, and Southern Methodist University was just opening its doors.
Seventy-four years later, SMU is going back to its future.
This year, grizzled NFL Hall of Famer Forrest Gregg is leading a pack of fearless freshman pollwings into that lake of acid as the nation's most punished college football program rises from the graveyard of the NCAA's "death penalty."
"This is the most unique situation a university ever found itself in as far as football," said athletic director Doug Single. "We're on our last chance here. We've got to make it work, or it's over."
Big surprise
That SMU is even back at all is a surprise to some. Eight times the school has been penalized by the NCAA, and the last scandal — the one where Texas Gov. Bill Clements admitted he approved continuing payments to players as chairman of the school's Board of Governors — even took down the school's president.
The nation's ninth winningest major college football program in the 1980s was dead for two years because of NCAA sanctions.
Now, SMU is a different university as a result of the football follies, with a different form of government, a reforming president and an athletic department determined to make the alma mater of Doak Walker, Kyle Rote, Raymond Berry, Don Meredith, Eric Dickerson and yes, Forrest Gregg, competitive again.
Polygraph tests included
The school, which remains on probation for another year, has installed a battery of reforms and safeguards, including a mandatory course on ethics for athletes, a ban of boosters from recruiting, internal and external audits, NCAA rules tests and, if needed, polygraph tests.
A new Board of Trustees is in place committed to shedding the school's dubious past, and the school was thrilled, to get a coach of Gregg's unquestioned integrity.
But will it be enough?
Already, one booster banned from SMU football approached president A. Kenneth Pye, a highly respected educator lured away from Duke, and suggested a return to misdeeds was the only way to compete in Texas.
"There's never any assurance
you can keep out the soundruns, Pye
said. "I've made it quite clear that if I find out about (cheating), we will self-report and I will recommend to the board of trustees that we drop football. Period."
"We are just not going to put up with it."
SMU also says it's not going to put up with losing; either.
Not satisfied with losing
Athletic Director Single, a member of Stanford's 1971 and 1972 Rose Bowl teams who came to SMU from Northwestern, says the school will not be satisfied to compete only with the likes of Rice and, well, Northwestern.
"That won't work here, not with Texas football being what it is," Single said. "SMU is going to have to toe it up with Texas, and toe it up with Arkansas and toe it up with Texas A&M."
"One of them told me,
A. Kenneth Pye SMU president
One of them told me, 'You don't understand what's necessary to win down here.' I said, 'Let me make my own mistakes.' I've made it quite clear that if I find out about (cheating), we will self-report and I will recommend to the board of trustees that we drop football. Period.'
The school says it is committed to winning with true student athletes — athletes who can meet the same admissions standards as other students (minimum SAT score about 900), who can play without routine redshifting of freshman, and who can graduate.
And Single says the third ingredient in this magic potion, besides winning and staying clean, is that SMU football will have to be financially viable.
That may be as tough as the first two. Home games have been moved from Texas Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys, back on campus to aging Ownbay Stadium, a 23,733-seat bleacher bowl, that hasn't hosted a Mustang game in 41 years.
A small private institution can't afford a big-time football program that loses money," Single said. "If any one of those three aren't there, we'll probably have to re-evaluate what we're doing."
Monitoring period
As far as the NCAA goes, enforcement director David Berst says the
school remains in a "monitoring period" until a final meeting to review progress and "ensure they know what they're doing."
"I doubt we will watch them more closely than others." Berst said.
Out on the Astrufort, the more weighty matter confronting SMU football is a schedule that includes national champion Notre Dame and five other teams that could be bowlbought this year.
Gregg, who left the Green Bay Packers to restore SMU, takes only 42 scholarship players into battle because of NCAA sanctions. He has only three who have ever played in a college football game. What they lack in size, speed and experience they make up for in courage, no doubt.
"We didn't recruit people we thought couldn't survive losing," said Gregg. "They had to have enough belief in their ability to play right now."
Gregg, the man Vince Lombardi called the "finest player I have ever coached" and the first person to participate in the Super Bowl both as a starting player and as a head coach, has instilled in me the confidence and a 3-4 defense to try to make up for SMU's deficiencies in size and strength.
If he had his choice, he said, he would play everyone's freshman team this year.
"We'll play the cards dealt us," he said.
A proven recruiter
Already, Gregg has proven he can successfully recruit, high school talent guru Max Emfinger said. His first year he had only 15 scholarship to give and couldn't leave the campus, but several good players came to him and were won over.
"And he had a great year this year," Efminger said. "He got five offensive linemen who will probably play together for four years."
Emminger ranks Gregg's recruiting about 5th best in the Southwest Conference.
"It was unbelievable to go in there and sit down and talk to Forrest Gregg," said linebacker Mike Ostos, whose father, an SMU graduate, has been paying his tuition so that a scholarship could go to another player.
The Mustangs head into the season with a unique brand of excitement. The players and the coach see themselves as pioneers blessed with the opportunity to build a program from scratch, the chance to say they had a hand in resurrecting SMU, and the chance to play every down.
"There's no pressure because we don't have anything to lose," said wide receiver Michael Bowen, who
See SMU, p. 11, col.
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