A SINGLE VISION OF MUSTANG ATHLETICS

COME IN. SIT DOWN. GET out the notebook and scribble fast, because Doug Single isn’t going to waste your time with those windy unec-dotes about what a good player so-and-so is and what the team’s chances are against A&M and how these boys’re gonna show us what real dedication is all about.

Whatever happened to the regular old sports interview, where a grown man in a baseball cap and white socks and those tacky old black coach’s shoes would say. “We recruited a boy who’s so damn big we could build a condo on his gut”? Why do you feel like you’re with a federal bank examiner who’s going through the books of another screwed-up savings and loan? Why do you wish you had worn a tie and had thought of more intelligent questions to ask?

Why? Because you’re in Singleworld now. Forget about the old image of an athletic director, the old ex-coach who liked to eat barbeque sandwiches with rich alumni and read field and Stream instead of the NCAA rule book. Sitting across from you is the new portrait of major collegiate athletics-Doug Single, a blunt, rabidly energetic young man who sounds like a lawyer, except for those times when he sounds like an accountant. He spits out numbers, admissions figures, SAT scores; he recites the fine print of recruiting bylaws; he spends ten minutes laying out the intricate financial arrangement of television contracts. He does all this in such a rat-a-tat style that you’re almost on your way out the door before you remember a key question: is any of this fun? That’s the whole point of all this sports stuff, isn’t it? Fun?

Doug Single-at age thirty-seven, athletic director of the most beleaguered sports program in the country-smiles. “Fun as hell,” he says. And then off he goes into the role he plays best: the dynamic visionary, leading SMU athletics into a new era. When he took over the athletic department in October 1987 (the Mustangs were banned from NCAA football for the ’87 season and chose to forfeit the 1988 season as well), he said that no program in the country would be run cleaner than his. He got rid of almost everyone who worked under previous university administrations. The old football, track and field, and basketball coaches left. Other coaches were told that they would be tested on recruiting rules reviews, and if they failed, they might get fired.

Everything is changing in Singleworld. He has changed letterheads on the department’s stationery. He has even demanded that more blue be emphasized when showing the school’s red and blue colors. And he is far from humble about his plans. At the annual Southwest Conference kickoff luncheon held at Dallas’s Hyatt Regency Hotel this past summer, when it came time for SMU to make its presentation about the upcoming season, the voiceover on the school’s introductory video began with the words: “SMU. Tradition. Integrity.” Laughter spread through the audience-which only made Single more determined.

SMU, he says, “is going to end up two or three years ahead of many institutions in the kinds of programs we’re running. In the long run, a lot of schools will look to us as a way to having both academic excellence and a clean, successful athletic program.”

Sounds great. As long as you recognize that “successful” doesn’t necessarily mean winning. Doug Single knows he doesn’t have a very good answer when someone asks him if by “successful” he means another Cotton Bowl appearance or ten football wins a season. “Everyone harks back to SMU’s Cotton Bowl appearance [1983],” he says, “but in more recent years, the team was 6-5, and that was with a dirty program. I happen to believe very strongly that SMU can be 6-5 with a clean program.”

And 6-5 is just about what an SMU fan can expect. With academic excellence now more prized than athletic success at SMU, the school will never again be able to get the best athletes-kids who are almost invariably the worst students. Before Single arrived only 40 percent to 50 percent of the school’s football players ever graduated within five years; many of them were sheltered by a special admissions policy, majoring in what Single calls “”staying eligible” for the next season. “Major schools have a place to put those kids and help them,” says Single. “but where are we going to put them here in a small, private school?” New SMU student athletes are going to have to meet stricter academic requirements to be eligible to play spoils, if you think “strict” means a minimum 2.0 grade point average and 900 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

But he remains optimistic, A former Stanford University football player, Single was hired at age twenty-nine as Northwestern University’s athletic director, and he spent seven years rebuilding that dismal department, where the football team was working on a thirty-four-game losing streak. He helped raise $30 million, built new facilities, and hired a new string of coaches, including one who coached the football team to four wins in one season-a miracle at Northwestern. Even more important tor Single’s new boss at SMU, president A. Kenneth Pye, Doug Single’s athletes graduated. The last two years he was at Northwestern, all the players on the football and basketball teams graduated while 95 percent of all athletes earned degrees.

“We’re not de-emphasizing athletics,” he says. “I wouldn’t have taken this job if the board or faculty had taken the position to de-emphasize athletics. I’ve come into the opportunity to reemphasize athletics in a new environment. But we’re not trying to lose games. This is a very competitive conference, and we expect to be successful in it.”

Time-and rival teams-will judge thestrength of Single’s Clean Machine. Untilthen, Single will have to endure more snickering at Southwest Conference luncheons-which doesn’t bother him in the least. Hesays, “Others might have a wait-and-see attitude, but it doesn’t lake much to see how forwe’ve already come.”