SPORTS THE BAD NEWS MUSTANGS

The last time a football sailed through the air at Ownby Stadium on the SMU campus, Doak Walker was in his Heisman trophy season for the Mustangs. Now, forty-one years later, the refurbishing of Ownby, where SMU opens its season September 2 against Rice, is an apt metaphor for the return of a football program that was struck as dead as the offensive formations of Walker’s day by the NCAA.

But the comeback from the 1987 death penalty, engineered by the school president, athletic director, and coach who arrived in the wake of the football program’s last, fatal scandal, brings with it several key questions. Specifically, can football success and a true commitment to student athletes coexist? Can the program stay clean? And can a team made up primarily of red shirts and freshmen, more than half of them walk-ons, take the pounding of a full Southwest Conference schedule?

Athletic director Doug Single arrived with some possible answers in October 1987, after serving in a similar position at Northwestern. During the campus debate over what to do with SMU football he heard from hardliners at either extreme, not only from those who thought pursuing Division I football at SMU was folly, but also from others who thought anything less than Texas Stadium exposure meant retreat. Mostly, though, he heard from those who just wanted a football team that made headlines on the sports page and not the front page. Kickoffs, not payoffs.

After a blue-ribbon commission turned in its report, Single got his marching orders from new school president Ken Pye. Single’s three-point stance: keep it clean, try not to lose too much money, and, while you’re at it, try to do something only a handful of schools have managed: field a respectable, competitive football team without letting the football program become the tail wagging the dog.

Point one, no cheating. SMU was in NCAA jail often enough before the death penalty was meted out. If it’s ever learned that the school has paid players again, it would not only mean the end of football forever, but probably all sports. The school now has an actual director of compliance, Cynthia Patterson, and an almost obsessive desire to follow the regulations.

But what about overzealous alums who still think, for whatever demented reason, they can hurry the team’s return to greatness by slipping prospects a few grand under the table? New coach Forrest Gregg drew laughs at his introductory press conference in January of last year when he promised, in a widely quoted statement, that he’d “smack ’em in the mouth’1 (although he wasn’t laughing when he said it). Single, however, is convinced that most alums recognize the gravity of the situation. Also, he adds, “Most people point to the alumni and say they’re the reason you had these problems. They weren’t at all. There hasn’t been any major violation that I’m aware of that’s come before the [NCAA] committee on infractions that did not involve also key members of the staff or an athletic director who knew about it or condoned it.”

Point two, the program has to be fiscally responsible. That doesn’t mean it has to make money (it won’t), but it can’t be a drag on the general fund. As Pye explains, “When you have a football program that’s supposed to make money, you start that insidious process of corruption. Either it has an educational objective or it ought not to be run by the academy; it ought to be treated like minor league baseball or hockey.”

This year the school is only paying half the team-legally, with scholarships-to play. The walk-ons only cost what it takes to equip and transport them. And there is broadcast income from the Southwest Conference radio/TV package and gate percentages on the road. Selling out Ownby will put paying customers in 24,576 seats for home games against Rice, Connecticut, Texas, Baylor, North Texas, and Texas Tech. Purely in terms of capacity, Ownby is a big comedown from Texas Stadium, where SMU played from 1979 to 1986. But fans at SMU games often felt like BBs rattling around in a tin can. And, more importantly to Pye and Single, an average of only 800 to 900 students attended games at the Cowboy mausoleum; Single expects 4,000 to 5,000 at Ownby. In fact, Ownby is one of the keys to the program’s revival. The school is banking that swapping Irving’s sterility for the old-fashioned feel of football on a festive campus will help provide the lure that quality football might not. As Ken Pye points out, “We have 4,000 graduates in Highland and University Park-they can all walk to the game.”

In the long term, the success of the second of Doug Single’s goals rests on the outcome of the critical third: Pye’s insistence “that we run this program with high academics, high ideals, and high integrity, but that we’re competitive. Too many small private schools find themselves in a situation where they aren’t competitive. It isn’t our mission to send kids out there and end up 0-11 and say, ’Well, we run an honorable program. Doesn’t this have value?’”

In other words, this fall’s Ponies will not be sent out to fight a valiant, suicidal rear guard action. Single is SMU’s best salesman, and the line he pitches with a fervor devoid of cant is that SMU has not deem-phasized, but reeemphasized football. The Ponies’ game will be played by student athletes, as opposed to the “student” (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) athletes who take a B.S. in football with the hope of graduate work in the NFL. But they will be student athletes who expect to have at least a chance of winning any game,

In purely football terms, of course, this goal is as far out of reach as it is honorable. By instituting a higher minimum SAT requirement simply for admission to me university, the team is guaranteed players who can not only walk and chew gum at the same time, but maybe discuss its chemical composition, or the economic impact of new marketing strategies on Wrigley’s Spearmint. But what happens when all those brains line up across from some 300-pound behemoth who, in the immortal words of former Cowboys linebacker Hollywood Henderson, couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted him the “c” and the “a-and who is also bigger, stronger, and a third-year starter?

It’s a question that Forrest Gregg had to address from his first day on the job.

Single needed more than just someone with coaching credentials to revive the program. He needed a presence. He got it in SMU alumnus and Birthright. Texas, native Gregg, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman who played for Green Bay in two Super Bowls (and for Dallas in one, in his last year as a player) and later coached Cincinnati in another. Gregg says he left his head coaching job at Green Bay because of his strong feelings for the school in its hour of humiliation, but he was also admittedly smitten by the prospect of building a team from scratch. Gregg’s reputation is that of the original straight shooter, and his blend of realism with hopefulness and high expectations is exhilarating.

Discussing his players’ ability to learn the new defensive and offensive schemes, for example, Gregg says proudly, “Mentally, we couldn’t load them down. When we came back in the spring it was amazing how much of our offense and defense they grasped, how much carryover there was from the fall.”

That’s good, because on a team almost barren of experience (just three players have seen Southwest Conference action), the players’ wits may be their best weapon; that, and the high-octane run-and-shoot offense that Gregg and his staff have installed. The run-and-shoot has two qualities that make it attractive: inexperienced players don’t have to learn multiple pass protections, and brute strength isn’t a dominant factor, since running plays are designed for the perimeter, not the trenches.

The same concentration on quick thinking and mobility prevails on defense. “Our defense is the basic 3-4,” Gregg explains, “but we won’t just sit in that, either-we don’t have the strength. The plus is that we have the people with the mental ability to handle all this. We don’t have to make a square peg fit into a round hole.”

That sounds like a case of making lemonade when life hands you lemons, and in a sense it is. But as Gregg points out, he knew the restrictions going in, and he wouldn’t have taken the job had he not believed that a competitive team could be built within the Pye-Single framework. And as if to prove it, SMU’s spring 1989 high school recruiting class was generally ranked a surprising fourth-best in the conference.

One who came last year-when the Mustangs could offer only fifteen scholarships and raced the promise of a year without playing a real game-is this year’s probable | starting quarterback, Mike Romo, who graduated from San Antonio Roosevelt with a 3.9 GPA. He is typical of one kind of SMU recruit, the student athlete who was thought by others to be just a little too small or inex- perienced or slow or damaged to play top- level college football. In other words, a player with something to prove.

In Romo’s case, an injury in spring foot- ball of his junior year cooled the interest that had been shown in him by several football powerhouses, the service academies, and the Ivy League. By the time he was fit and playing again, recruiting had passed him by. He committed to Rice, but a visit to the SMU campus and a meeting with the coaching staff, to say nothing of his appreciation of the quarterback’s key role in the run-and-shoot, convinced him to red shirt in ’88. He also liked the wide-open opportunities that the unique start-up situation offers.

“It’s a write-your-own-ticket thing,” he explains. “Coach Gregg gives everyone a chance to come in and do what they’re capable of. At another school, being a quarterback, all I would have done the first year is run the scout team and get trampled anyway.”

Meaning he decided to go to school where he could get trampled in real games instead?

“I don’t think anyone came in here thinking we would beat Texas or Arkansas [this year]. But everyone, and the coaching staff, is sincere about competing. No one’s saying, ’Oh God, we’re going to get killed. We’re going to lose.’ You just can’t have that idea and progress as a football team. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Well, maybe nothing to lose except a few games, the most talked-about being a late-season visit to Notre Dame (an early-season game against the Oklahoma killing machine was mercifully dropped), But after games against Texas and Texas A&M, Notre Dame could seem like just another outing, and even the likely hammering by the Irish has a place in Doug Single’s plan. Notre Dame, he says, is one of the few bastions of the genuine student athlete, and it’s a school, a stadium, and a tradition he wants his players to see close-up (even if a few of them see it through bandages). And in his long-range vision for the SMU football program, he too thinks SMU has nothing to lose and the world to gain.

“People call it an experiment, but there are other schools that have high academics and good football and play cleanly,” Single says. “I hope that we become a model for other schools that take a look at this arms race that they’ve gotten into and say, ’Wait a minute.’ It’s a big goal, but it’s a worthy one, because the only alternative is to drop out, and that’s really not much of an alternative.”