Back to the Future for SMU?

[The Ancient Enemy]

It seems like only yesterday that Eric Dickerson sprinted up and down the field for the SMU Mustangs, and the program was in great shape. Between 1980 and 1985, the program achieved success that it hadn't seen since the early 1950's. But the sad reality of those glory days of the early eighties, with Bobby Collins as coach and Dickerson in the backfield, is that they were a long, long lifetime ago. Within those past 23 years, you could say SMU served a life sentence. The decisions handed down by the NCAA for the violations SMU garnered between 1974 and 1987 are well known as the SMU Death Penalty. The carpet-bombing the NCAA waged on the program left them looking like they'd been tied to a horse and dragged from The Hill to the Stockyards and back again. They never recovered. But now, for the first time in 23 years, SMU maybe has a chance to drag itself out of the grave it dug for itself over 20 years ago. To drag itself from the grave they were placed in by the death penalty.

But therein lies the possible problem.

It took an enormous amount of campaigning for Athletic Director Steve Orsini to get the money together from the boosters and alumni to pay June Jones $2 million a year for a 5 year contract. Jones, a former head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, has previously taken a destitute Hawaii program and turned them into the rare BCS buster, in 2007, winning 12 games total. Jones' work in Hawaii was nothing short of miraculous. With the lack of facilities and support that he encountered on the islands, what he did there is worth immense applause. Maybe he can build another non-BCS powerhouse, because, after all, just like Orsini and the excited fans, we are going by history as to how this Jones experiment might pan out.

When you drive around the Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex, there is no shortage of advertising for the future of SMU football. Billboards dot the landscape, and there is a buzz in the air for the first time since those great early-eighties days. They even went back to the white helmets. But is there a downpour on the horizon that no one else has noticed? Will it be 'back to the future' for SMU in a way they totally overlooked?

What you have is a league where virtually every school, this offseason, has dealt with players of questionable character. Kids are in trouble every day. A lot of it gets swept under the carpet, but more and more the stories are leaking to the media. That's good and also bad. In a lot of those cases, the universities were criticized for recruiting and accepting players who were 'bad apples'. SMU's academics are not conducive to bad apples. This is a school with a very prestigious alumni base, especially in the area, and it was a few members of that prestigious and rich local alumni base that got SMU into trouble in the first place. At the end of the day, the types of people we are dealing with are the same types of people who pay kids to go to their college.

It's pretty safe to say that we all know that Jones will need to recruit decent players to get this ball rolling. He is recruiting against the following teams, locally: Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, TCU, Oklahoma, Baylor, LSU, Arkansas, and Oklahoma State. SMU should never win a recruiting battle against any of those teams except maybe TCU. That list doesn't even include the rash of talent that the state loses each season from much larger programs who grab a player here and there from the Lone Star State. In a perfect world, we don't need to keep an open eye on SMU's recruiting while we're asleep at night.

Behind center is reinstated QB Justin Willis, who sat out the spring on a suspension. All Willis did in 2007 was throw for 3,000 yards. To no one's surprise, Willis is back as the starting quarterback. I'm sure there's a million SMU fans who were worried that Willis wouldn't be allowed to play, right?

There is a formula for success that Jones brings, which is what attracted SMU. Jones took a chance on a kid and it paid off 4.4 million fold. June Jones took a chance on a quarterback from Colorado who was accused of rape. As far as questionable character goes, there is only one thing in this world that is worse than rape, and that is murder. Whether or not those allegations were true or false, what Jones did for Colt Brennan shows how good of a human being June Jones really is. He took that chance on Brennan when no one else would, and there's generally a case to be made that everyone deserves a shot to redeem themselves and their character. This next statement is in no way written in an effort to throw dirt on a good human being, but the fact remains that Jones has shown propensity to take that chance.

If you are going to go by history, go by all of it. Be objective.

It is a great story locally and for all of college football, and hopefully after two decades of suffering, the SMU players and fans will get to be a part of a great moment in their school's history. It will happen, soon. But hopefully everyone associated with SMU football is smart enough to realize that another situation like the one twenty years ago is not just going to bring another life sentence. They'll be bringing Old Sparky out of retirement, and that will be the end of that.