Few opponents have been able to rein in the SMU Mustangs as they’ve galloped toward Saturday’s Atlantic Coast Conference championship game. Led by quarterback Kevin Jennings and defensive end Elijah Roberts, the Mustangs posted a nineteen-point average margin of victory over ACC opponents this year. With a win this weekend, SMU could secure a spot in the twelve-team College Football Playoff.
Moneyed backers have played a crucial role in helping the Mustangs reach this year’s ACC title game. Those boosters and the university negotiated SMU’s way into the ACC in September 2023. But there was a catch. SMU football had to agree to forgo nine years of TV revenue—rights fees that are reportedly worth about $30 million per year. To ensure SMU wouldn’t fall behind its ACC competitors, the boosters had to make up the difference. They did, raising about $100 million in a one-week fund-raising blitz in 2023 (and adding more than $50 million since).
The payoff from that investment came quickly, but it wouldn’t have come at all had something similar not happened back in 1992, when SMU boosters also reached into their deep pockets to bail out the football program. Had they not done so, SMU might be playing the Division III Carnegie Mellon Tartans on Saturday instead of the Clemson Tigers. Or it might not be playing football at all.
In the spring of 1992, SMU’s Dallas campus was in a fight over football and finances. The university had been cutting costs ever since the NCAA imposed its harshest judgment ever, a season-long ban in 1987 known as the “death penalty,” for repeated violations of NCAA rules. “After the death penalty,” says C. Paul Rogers, a law professor who was dean of SMU’s law school in 1992 and has served as the university’s faculty athletic representative since 1987, “our fund-raising stopped dead.”
By 1992, SMU was close to going broke. The university’s president, A. Kenneth Pye, froze faculty and staff pay and slashed departmental budgets. That didn’t stop the bleeding in the athletic department, which was running an annual operating shortfall of close to $2 million. Academic resources were diverted to cover that deficit, raising the ire of many faculty members. In April 1992, more than a hundred teachers signed a petition calling for the university to evaluate its athletic finances and “consider all remedial steps, including withdrawal from Division I.”
The university administration responded to that outcry by forming a task force to study how SMU could afford to continue financing a Division I football program. Pye asked the twelve-person group (which included NFL star and SMU alum Forrest Gregg and Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt) to consider whether SMU should drop down to Division I-AA (now called the Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS) or to Division III, or even drop football altogether. “This was not some phony, contrived, precooked operation that was going to keep football no matter what,” says Chris Rentzel, who graduated from SMU in the 1970s and was president of the Mustang Club in 1992. “It was precarious. It was do or die for the football program.”
In fact, Rentzel says one of the task force members he spoke to at the time told him that football was likely to be axed due to concerns about whether SMU could ever be competitive again in major college football. At the time, SMU was hamstrung by its own admission rules and a financial problem similar to the one the school faced while trying to get into the ACC last year. Namely: The Southwest Conference haves—Texas and Texas A&M among them—wanted concessions from the have-nots, including SMU. To keep the Southwest Conference together, SMU had to cede TV revenue to the big boys of the conference, putting further strain on SMU’s athletic finances when the school could least afford it.
Days after SMU won its first football game of the 1992 season, word spread around campus that the university was leaning toward getting out of big-time football. SMU student newspapers followed the task force’s progress closely. “The alumni were really pissed off about the possibility of losing football or going down a division,” says Drew Moss, an SMU grad who edited an alternative campus paper at the time and now works as a partner at the Miami law firm of Kutner, Rubinoff & Moss.
Alumni groups launched letter-writing campaigns to pressure Pye into ensuring that big-time football would survive on campus. One campaign was organized by Bob McNutt, an SMU alum whose family had founded the famed fruitcake-making Collin Street Bakery, in Corsicana. He told a reporter at the time, “I like to think there is a silent majority out there that supports SMU athletics.”
Another letter-writing campaign was organized by George “Sil” Alfonso, a 1989 SMU graduate. I talked to Alfonso this week as he was packing his bags for the ACC championship game, held in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Most of my contacts were in the era of the death penalty,” Alfonso says. “So I think we had a little extra standing to say, ‘Look, we’ve been at SMU with football and without football, and we’re not going to let you take football away.’”
By November 1992, McNutt’s silent majority was getting louder, and its anger was targeted at Pye. Someone tacked up flyers on campus that accused the university president of conducting a “slanderous campaign against the football team.” Alfonso shared that sentiment. He says he considered Pye, a New York native, to be a “carpetbagger who wanted to come to SMU and kill Doak Walker’s program because it costs money.”
But Rogers, the law professor, says Pye wanted nothing of the sort. (Pye died in 1994.) “Ken loved football,” Rogers says. “I’ve had lots of conversations over the years with many of our most supportive alumni where I’ve tried to convince them that Ken was not anti-athletics. He was just worried about the health of the university.”
Pye was in SMU’s Ownby Stadium for the November 7, 1992, game against Houston. Moss was there too, handing out postcards that read “Save SMU Football” on their front sides, with the backs left blank for personal testimonies. Days later, Moss delivered a package of signed postcards to Pye’s office. Pye didn’t accept the package personally, so Moss isn’t sure what became of the cards. “I think Pye probably threw them in the trash,” Moss says. “He really didn’t like people telling him what to do.”
Later that month, the university organized a press conference to announce the release of the task force’s report. After months of deliberation, the group had decided that getting out of football was a nonstarter. “This is the school of Doak Walker and Don Meredith and Eric Dickerson and Craig James, and we’re in Texas,” Rogers says. “So, dropping football didn’t make sense.”
Division I-AA didn’t appeal to the task force either. Even though a move to the lower division would ease expenses, Rogers says the task force wasn’t interested in competing against so-called “directional schools,” such as Southeastern Oklahoma.
The task force looked more favorably on a move to Division III, where SMU could expect to save money on athletics and join a conference with elite academic institutions, but it ultimately recommended that SMU remain in Division I. “I had no idea whether we were going to keep football until that announcement,” Rentzel recalls. After he heard the news, Rentzel left the room and, in a half sprint, headed for the football practice field, where he told then–head coach Tom Rossley that his program would continue. Players broke into cheers.
Still, there was a catch. The task force said that SMU would only be able to maintain a presence in Division I football if the school’s boosters—especially the Mustang Club—could cover the athletic department’s budget deficit. “It’s a formidable challenge,” Pye told reporters. “However, if all the people who have written me a letter about SMU football in the last four months would give something, we could make it.”
Alfonso, who hopes his letter-writing campaign influenced the task force, was among those who stepped up and wrote a check to the Mustang Club that year. Other checks came in too—enough to allow SMU to stay in Division I until its football fortunes finally turned around.
Pye noted one more point of interest at that press conference more than thirty years ago. He said he hoped the Mustangs would eventually become competitive and that “from time to time,” the team might compete “for the top.”
Three decades later, SMU is doing just that.
