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The date was Feb. 25, 1987. NCAA Infractions Committee Chairman David Berst entered a quiet room filled with anxious reporters and delivered a bombshell that still resonates with even the most casual of football fans.
When SMU received the NCAA’s vaunted “death penalty” on that fateful day in Dallas, all of college football stood in shocked disbelief. It was hard to fathom, even after continuous and blatant disregard for even the most basic of regulations, that the Mustangs had been stricken from the college football landscape. Since returning to the football field in 1989, SMU has never come close to reaching the heights it achieved during those notorious years under Ron Meyer and Bobby Collins.
None of it is lost on Eric Dickerson, the NFL Hall of Famer whose class at SMU has become one of the most notorious groups in college football’s long history. Currently, the Mustangs are 0-2 and just lost coach June Jones after being outscored by North Texas and Baylor by a combined score of 88-6 in the season’s first two outings.
It all prompted Dickerson to lash out on Monday, blaming school officials for the Mustangs’ current plight. Dickerson, who enjoyed incredible success as leader of the “Pony Express”, believes the program is being held back by an administration that has misplaced priorities for the football program.
Obviously, the festering sore of SMU’s past still haunts Dickerson. It’s never easy to see a storied college career wiped out with a single announcement on a rainy Dallas day. What is most troubling and revealing is Dickerson’s apparent desire for his alma mater to return to those rules-blinking days of the 1980s.
Unfortunately, Dickerson has a point. He cited the rampant cheating that still permeates college football’s biggest powers. In that vein, Dickerson’s argument is essentially the same approach SMU ultimately took the first time around. Specifically, if everyone else is cheating and getting away with it, why not us?
The real truth? Nothing much has changed since the wild and wholly days of the 1980s. When the NCAA first adopted its repeat offender clause, the official title of death penalty legislation, it was intended as the ultimate deterrent for blatant rules breakers.
Since being introduced as official legislation, the NCAA has issued the penalty to a Division I school on just one occasion: To SMU. There have been other opportunities for the NCAA to enforce the legislation, but it has systematically balked on each occasion. The last time was in relation to the Penn State scandal involving Jerry Sandusky’s molestation of children.
Still, the NCAA remains wholly reluctant to enforce even strict penalties, much less the death penalty. There is not enough time and space to list all the NCAA’s bungled infractions investigations. In the final analysis, it’s simply enough to note the NCAA’s practice of enforcement has become a running joke in college football circles.
Dickerson knows it and so does any college football insider. Should Dickerson be held in contempt for simply wanting to play by the same rules others enjoy? Arguments have been made both ways.
At the end of the day, Dickerson’s words reflect a more troubling fact. For all their blathering about enforcing rules, the NCAA has the same problems it had when it slapped SMU with the death penalty. In other words, the NCAA’s efforts of deterrent have failed miserably.
After all, what did SMU’s death penalty really achieve? Has the culture of college football changed? Have others been sufficiently deterred from cheating their way to wins and in some cases, national titles? Based on current conditions, one can only answer with a definitive “no.” The result is a college football landscape that looks an awful like the one SMU got nuked for in the 1980s.
Matt Johnson is a Big Ten basketball writer for www.rantsports.com. Follow him on Twitter at mattytheole or “like” him on Facebook.
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