My Plan To Save SMU Football

I’D LIKE TO SAY A FEW THOROUGH-ly optimistic, completely uncynical things about SMU football. Please excuse me. It’s difficult. It’s not my nature. It’s not even in fashion anymore.

But on the day after SMU received the so-called “death penalty” from the NCAA, no fewer than three commentators predicted it would mean the end of major-college football in Dallas. Hence began the cycle of exponential hysteria. {The farther you are from the actual bribery, the more hysterical you’re allowed to get.) Two weeks later, SMU issued its report on the “Nasty Nine Boosters” to the NCAA, amid the self-righteous avalanche of university officials, “honest alumni,” student leaders, congressmen, and Methodist bishops all fighting for the chance to declare the final damnation of the unjust.

The scandal didn’t mean anything in concrete terms to more than a hundred or so athletes and coaches. But it’s a symbol. The NCAA and Governor Clements. God bless him, have seen to that, ft appears to the outside world as an utter defeat and a just conviction. It appears to many of us who live here as the symbol of an enormously petty crime, played out by overgrown boys with fat checkbooks, Texas Stadium skyboxes, friends named “Hoss,” and wives named “Keli.” Please get these guys a guest shot on “Wheel of Fortune” so that we can get on with the business of.. .

Rebuilding SMU football. Not only rebuilding it, but making it the most beloved, respected, and admired football program in the nation.

I’m not kidding. Notice (hat I say nothing about “winning.” If that comes later, wonderful. But SMU, right now, has an opportunity that no other university in the nation has. Here are the steps necessary to turn Black Wednesday-the day the Death Penalty came down-into one of the most glorious days in the school’s history:

1. Get real about what this is. NCAA infractions are not “crimes.” even though they are commonly described that way. They were violations of no law. It was cheating. Not only was it cheating; it was the kind of cheating that requires two people- the briber and the bribee. Why is there virtually no mention of the “crimes” of these players? Nothing is more ridiculous than Congressman John Bryant’s federal bill to put boosters in prison for “’corrupting” student athletes. If you put the boosters in prison, then you need to put the athletes in prison, too. This is the way every commercial bribery bill has been written since time immemorial.

Likewise, if we’re going to continue to punish people-by issuing reports, commissioning investigations, and the like-then let’s ask more basic questions than “Who paid the money? ” and “Who knew about the money?” Let’s ask questions like “How does a man like Bill Clements, with a reputation as being militantly anti-intellectual, become head of the SMU Board of Governors in the first place?” And if we’re going to punish people, then let’s punish every lie and every broken promise. Here are three examples.

(a) Faculty representative Lonnie Kliever, who seems to be one of the few level-headed individuals associated with the mess, said on the day the “death penalty” was announced that he regretted not being able to announce the names of the nine guilty boosters. The implication, by Kliever and by the NCAA investigators, is that they had agreed to hold the boosters’ names in confidence in exchange for their full disclosure of what money was paid, when it was paid, etc. If this is true, then the promise was broken less than two weeks later. If it was made and broken, then SMU is guilty of either (a) lying to the boosters to get what they wanted, instead of doing a more traditional investigalion, or (b) selling them down the river to take the heat off of other people, which is worse. So. if you’re looking for fair and even-handed punishment of everyone who did anything wrong, you need to punish the person who made the secrecy deal with the boosters (if it was unauthorized) or the one who broke the secrecy deal with the boosters (if it was authorized).

If you’re going to punish the boosters, then you have to pun ish the board members who knew about the boosters. If the boosters are banned from any association with the university, then the ousted governors deserve the same. We’re talking about the Dallas business establishment-men like Clements, Ed Cox, Robert Folsom, Robert Stewart-men who have sat on corporate boards for much of their lives and know all the rules. The buck stops at the board.

If you’re going to punish everyone, you have to punish the players who took the money. There are several ways to do this. You could ask them to return all awards they won while at SMU- things like letters, trophies, rings, the usual trinkets that athletes are given for outstanding athletic performances. And certainly their names could be published, preferably with the amounts of cash, goods, and services they received while in school.

If you want justice, you have to go all the way.

But there’s a better way-a way that will mark SMU as a humane institution, an honest institution, a class institution:

2.Total forgiveness. The NCAA’s sanctions were intended to punish. All right. Then let’s assume the punishment is complete. Everyone got what they “deserved,” whatever that is. If the NCAA wants to punish anyone else, let the NCAA do the punishing. So the school should let every single person associated with SMU football know that they, as individuals, are not going to be blamed or hounded in perpetuity. Bobby Collins. Bob Hitch. The nine assistant coaches who have resigned. Apologies are also in order to several members of the press, who, it turns out, reported the truth from the start and then had . to defend their integrity against angry, hostile denials by the university. In other words, the clear message of the university should be, “If you have ever had an ounce of love for SMU in your heart, we need that feeling now. We need your friendship.”

3. Talk turkey with the guilty boosters. The nine alumni who actually made the payments need to be forgiven, too. I think it’s too easy to turn them into evil behind-the-scenes puppeteers-but they also have to know they can never be restored fully to grace. First of all, the NCAA is insisting on it. Second, these guys are not true fans. They’re people who get some sort of perverse pleasure out of watching professional, salaried players win games according to rules set up for amateurs. They are, in short, cheaters. They have to be told that their friendship is welcome but their money is not. If any of them desire to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the NCAA, they should be given this chance. The university should ask the NCAA to meet with them, on an individual basis, to remove the remorseful from the black list.

Now the hardest part is over.

Now the fun begins.

4. Hire Don Meredith to coach the 1988 team-or the 1989 team, if SMU cancels the 1988 mini-season. He’s perhaps the most famous SMU football alumnus, he likes the school, and his whole image is that of a guy who desperately wants to put the fun back in to the deathly serious game of football. I’m sure he has no desire to coach. Make it clear to him that it’s for one year only, for the sake of the school. Make it clear to him that he will have zero scholarships, and he may be coaching the only truly amateur team in the country. In other words, tell Don the alma mater needs him.

5. Tell the world that SMU will field the proudest team in its history. Get the word out. Dandy Don as a symbol will help. Get the word to every kid in rural Pennsylvania who feels as if he got passed over for a foot ball scholarship. Get the word out to every high school senior in West Texas who’s been declared too small to play the modern game. Use billboards and ads that say. “Every other team in the country has more creden tials. Come to us if you have heart.”

In the last two years, Texas A&M has captured the imagination of the country with its “Twelfth Man” team-walk-on, non-scholarship players who enter the game only for kickoffs and punts. We’re going to have a whole team of those guys, They’ll have to go through hell just to get admitted to the university. They’ll want to be there. They’ll have something to prove. They’ll be a family.

6. Let the players know we’re behind them. SMU will only be allowed seven games if they play in 1988, and none of those games can be played in Dallas. That means the university and the city have to go with the team to the games. In scheduling these games, the athletic department should make it clear that we want a minimum allotment of 10,000 tickets for SMU fans. And then we’ve got to get out and sell those tickets-all of them. Get the fans to the game. Make sure they know the players by name. Make sure the players get letters at their dormitories, telegrams of encouragement-no gifts, please-and every other kind of psychological support that means so much in the quiet, scary moments just before the whistle blows.

7. Set goals that will emphasize our vìc- tories, not our inadequacies. If SMU ends up with, say, a huge weight disadvantage in the trenches, or speed problems at wide receiver, or any of a thousand other prob lems that could afflict a walk-on team, then our goal for the first game the Mustangs play should be. . .one first down. The crowd should treat one first down as a touchdown, regard it as a touchdown, celebrate it as a touchdown. Even mark it down on our scorecard as a touchdown. We have to be able to see our progress, to understand it, and not just point to the final score, which is liable to be something like Them 44, Us 0.

Finally-and the program will live or die on the belief in this one principle-

8. Never be ashamed of brave defeat. The only way I know to illustrate this is with a personal story. Several years ago I coached a third-grade basketball team. As anyone who has coached eight-year-olds knows, most of them can scarcely dribble the ball, much less pass it, shoot it, or even remember which goal they’re supposed to shoot at.

Because of the way the Boys Club assigns children to teams (by neighborhoods), my team had only seven players. We had one talented player, named Ricky, who was also the shortest player in the league. With Ricky running the offense, we could sometimes score as many as six or eight points a game, but inevitably we would lose to bigger, faster teams.

It became obvious by the third or fourth week of the season that we would never win a game. I didn’t say anything to the players about it; in fact, i yelled myself hoarse at the games hoping that suddenly lightning would strike the opposing team and God would let us score thirty points one week, just to get that one victory before the season was over. But there was no happy it-turns-out-all-right-in-the-end movie ending in store for us. We continued to lose. The players became discouraged. They knew we were the smallest, and the shortest, and the team that got gerrymandered by the Boys Club. They knew we weren’t going to have victory hamburgers at McDonald’s. (One week we decided to go to McDonald’s anyway, but the kids kind of resented the trip. Something told them it was charity.)

Our last game was against one of the “average” teams in the league, which meant they were about ten points better than us. At halftime we were down 10 to 4. We talked about how to get the ball to Ricky quicker, in the hope of his being able to get off as many shots as possible in the second half. With two minutes left in the game, though, we were still hopelessly behind, and I noticed that tears had started to stream down Ricky’s cheeks. Two of the other players were crying, too, and so I called a timeout. I told Ricky that he had nothing to be ashamed of. I said all the standard things about doing your best and keeping your head up. Ricky was proud, and so he managed to keep the tears under control. And he said to me, steadily, without crying, “We wanted you to win a game, Mr. Bloom.”

I ran into one of the boy’s mothers a year later. She told me the kids still talked about it, that year when we didn’t win a game. We would have loved to have won just one game. That was our secret goal. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t matter. And that feeling, which I can’t describe any further except to say I wouldn’t trade it, is something that SMU could have, too. It has nothing to do with winning.