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After a season that saw the SMU Mustangs win the American Athletic Conference in the regular season, win the AAC Tournament and then lose in a not-so-legitimate fashion to the UCLA Bruins, SMU was going into the 2015-16 season with high expectations.
However, news broke recently that the NCAA would ban SMU from postseason play as well as suspend Head Coach Larry Brown for nine games due to numerous violations that include academic fraud, among others. The Mustangs will also lose nine scholarships over the next three years, but the most damage will be limited to this season.
Expect SMU to have success despite the sanctions and potentially compete with some of the top teams in the AAC. The Mustangs could ultimately decide whether some of the borderline NCAA Tournament teams in the American Athletic Conference go to the Big Dance or the NIT.
With no hope of postseason play, however, games with the Cincinnati Bearcats, Michigan Wolverines, Connecticut Huskies, Memphis Tigers and Gonzaga Bulldogs will be their biggest games of the season and will serve as a measuring point for what SMU might have been capable of given the chance of moving on.
No matter what happens, this season will be extremely disappointing for the Mustangs and should serve as a lesson to programs on the rise. In this day and age, you cannot get away with recruiting violations like you could before the internet era, and the Mustangs were rightly punished.
Just one question, however. How long do we have to wait before North Carolina‘s punishment, which should be deservedly worse, is announced?
Taylor Sturm is a Featured Writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @TSturmRS, like him on Facebook or add him to your network on Google.
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