Inside SMU's pursuit of the Power Five — 'It's a couple hundred million dollars. I'm not losing sleep over it.'
Inside SMU's pursuit of the Power Five — 'It's a couple hundred million dollars. I'm not losing sleep over it.'
SMU is headed for greener pastures in the ACC. How it all happened is a Texas-sized story filled with billionaires and big decisions.
If you want to feel really poor, this article is the perfect read.
In all seriousness, it's an interesting detailed narrative of how to get into a power conference (which took a little more effort than just ponying up $200M).
Of note:
At one point last fall, SMU officials were engrossed in serious conversations with all three conferences.
Referring to the ACC, Big XII, and PAC12 before the Texas schools in the Big XII stymied those efforts and the PAC12 imploded.
“It was, ‘OK, we know what we have to do,’” recalled Bill Armstrong. “It wasn’t, ‘Bill, are you good for a million a year?’ Nothing like that. It was, ‘Are you in?’ And everybody was like, ‘We’re in.’”
The combined net worth of the room was more than $15 billion.
And probably the most interesting tidbit was that SMU had hired Oliver Luck as a consultant, whom I consider basically the allegorical CFB czar given his crazy industry connections.
The combined net worth of the room was more than $15 billion.
Jesus Christ. Greed is ruining this sport
Oil money is just stupid money
So the thing you're NOT seeing here is the risk that the billionaires get distracted by something shiny and get bored of SMU, again. I am fan of their biggest rival, so adjust you bias dial accordingly, but this willingness to throw millions and millions at the program is pretty new, and seems to be at least partly a fit of pique that Sonny Dykes left for TCU and immediately had success. They've spent 35 years living in a world where SMU as a football power was not a thing, and only now that it's looking "easy" do they start putting their money where their mouths are.
I don't want to discount that it will be sustained, because the CFB world is very different than it was even 3-5 years ago, and they may finally have changed the administrative and faculty cultures, but I do think SMU needs to back it up with wins VERY quickly, or their benefactors may just consider it mission accomplished that they got them into a conference with Clemson and Stanford, and then find ways to spend their money that don't get them laughed at by their fellow Texan plutocrats at the Dallas Country Club. They've had a couple of nice years here and there, but they haven't put it together in a sustained or particularly strong way, with zero conference championships (including a lot of years in the WAC, CUSA, and the AAC) since 1984. It's also hard to describe SMU's relationship with Dallas itself, not officially being part of the main city they try to claim, and having a campus culture that is somehow more elitist than Bylor or TCU.
If they win, there's a lot to like (except for me), and clearly there can be a disconnect between the culture of a team and its school, but if they struggle, who will give a shit?