SMU’s billionaire boosters made an unprecedented bet. It paid off with a playoff spot

On the other side of the world, SMU football remained on Paul B. Loyd Jr.’s mind during a long few days in the Middle East.

Loyd has made many good investments in his life. Like so many Texans in the second half of the 20th century, he made millions from oil and drilling as an executive and investor. But he wasn’t just an oil guy. He was a proud former SMU football player, captain in the 1960s, who played in a Cotton Bowl. He watched the program regain national prominence in the ’80s behind the “Pony Express” backfield of Eric Dickerson and Craig James, the NCAA’s death penalty that banned the school from fielding a team in 1987, and the decades of purgatory that followed .

SMU was another investment for Loyd, but a more personal one. He has donated millions to the private school in Dallas over the years, partly in the hope that the football program would eventually change. The all-sports center attached to Gerald J. Ford Stadium is named after him. He also served on the school’s board of trustees for 25 years.

“I have lived in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and West Africa, and the connection to your school and athletics means a lot to me,” he said. “You know what this school has done for me. I get emotional.

An investment has never been so worthwhile.

Nearly 40 years after SMU football was temporarily closed and 30 years since the Southwest Conference was left scrambling for a home due to its dissolution, SMU football is back on the biggest stage and then traveling to a College Football Playoff game First round pick Penn State posted an 8-0 record in its first season as a member of the ACC.

A large part of this success is due to the players and coaches who made it possible on the field. But another factor was the millionaires and billionaires who funded it, paving the way for SMU to shake up college football like it did four decades ago.

“As a businessman, when you look at the return on our investments, that return is significant,” Loyd said.

Loyd was among a small group of major SMU donors who initially poured hundreds of millions into the facilities modernization program and then enabled SMU to rely on media rights payments from the ACC for nine years (totaling more than $200 million). to waive condition of their invitation to join the League.

What is $200 million between friends? The $50 million indoor exercise facility was named after Bill Armstrong and his wife as a result of their donation. The Garry Weber End Zone Complex, which opened this year, started with a $50 million donation from Weber’s foundation, and the Armstrongs poured another $15 million into the building. Within a week of accepting the ACC invitation last year, SMU donors raised $100 million to make up for the lack of television funding.

It was an unprecedented self-funding bet by a school convinced that if only it could secure an invitation to a power conference, everything would fall into place.

It happened faster than anyone could have imagined and this season was everything everyone involved dreamed of. SMU’s wealthy backers got the program into trouble all those years ago, but a new class brought the school back to the top. This time it was a good deal.

“It’s no longer, ‘If you make this investment, here’s what could happen,'” said billionaire SMU CEO David Miller, who led the fundraising and ACC efforts. “What we had hoped is happening now.

“It’s real. You can reach out and touch it, feel it.”

The dividends don’t stop with success in football. The men’s basketball team is 9-2 under first-year coach Andy Enfield, hired by USC, and next year brings a top-10 recruiting class with two four-star prospects (according to 247Sports Composite ratings) . The volleyball team recently reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

Outside of athletics, enrollment applications are up more than 40 percent, according to Miller. The SMU brand is bigger than it has been in decades. Miller says he has spoken with deans who have seen more applicants since SMU joined the ACC, lured by the opportunity to work with schools like Duke, Cal and Stanford.

“You give support so often, and at some point you might notice it,” said R. Gerald Turner, the school’s outgoing president, who came to the school in 1995. “But it’s just amazing that the turnaround happened so quickly.”

The first big investment came 16 years ago, when the Mustangs lured coach June Jones fresh off a run from Hawaii to a BCS bowl. But school administrators were still wary of the program’s troubled past. Jones won, as did his successors Chad Morris, Sonny Dykes and current head coach Rhett Lashlee, and with each step back, those in charge grew stronger in their pride in the game. SMU’s American Athletic Conference championship last year was the football program’s first title since 1984.

“It’s like a limb or limb has returned after being gone for so long,” said Thaddeus Matula, an SMU alumnus who made the 30 for 30 film “Pony Excess,” about the rise and fall of SMU. “The fact that SMU was a great program was part of my childhood. It’s great that it’s back.”

After an exodus from the Southwest Conference forced them to join the WAC in 1996, SMU did everything it could to ensure it didn’t fall behind again in conference realignment. It couldn’t afford not to. Turner, Miller and athletic director Rick Hart led a three-pronged attack with the help of agent Oliver Luck. When contacting other leagues, Turner took over as presidents, Hart as ADs, Miller as CEOs and Luck made the connections.

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The Big 12 passed. The Pac-12 was willing to invite SMU and San Diego State if it could hold together, but the league fell apart. SMU’s last chance was ACC, which always seemed to fit culturally with several other private schools in big cities. Acceptance came late in the realignment, only because NC State reversed its vote and gave the Mustangs the required 12 of 15 yes votes; Florida State, Clemson and North Carolina voted no. In its lawsuit seeking to withdraw from the ACC’s rights grant, FSU even accused the conference of “consciously choosing” to weaken its football media profile by including SMU.

Just four months into the league, SMU more than pulled its weight, topping the standings in ACC play and reaching the conference championship game with a 42-16 victory over Florida State.

“SMU was there from the start and just needed the right opportunity to achieve the success they had,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said. “It was beneficial for both the ACC and SMU.”

If Cal and Stanford were the headliners of the ACC additions last year, SMU was the third wheel. The Mustangs knew they had to prove they were the only program moving up from the Group of Five.

“I felt a responsibility to the ACC to show that we can add value and that even though we don’t take the media revenue, we can compete at a high level,” Hart said. “We wanted to invest in that. … Since I’ve been here, I’ve felt like this could be one of the top 10 sports programs in the country if we could position ourselves in a league like the ACC. We will never have as many alumni, but we have the potential to become a national brand again.”

The 30 for 30 film brought SMU’s story to a new generation at a time when public sentiment toward paying players was changing. Fourteen years later, athletes are allowed to benefit from their name, image and likeness rights, and SMU’s Boulevard Collective was the best-funded NIL company in the Group of 5 before moving to the ACC. Heading into the era of revenue sharing in the College sports will officially begin next year when the House-NCAA settlement is finalized, and SMU will resume making payments to players. It has the money. It always did.

“You have to be able to play this game hard, and that’s what we plan on doing,” Miller said.

It also plans to keep its coach. Despite a relatively quiet coaching carousel this year, Lashlee recently signed a contract extension (as a private school, SMU does not disclose the terms of their contracts). Bigger schools might come calling one day, but Loyd says SMU will never lose Lashlee for financial reasons.

“Nobody’s going to steal him for money,” Loyd said. “That won’t happen.”

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Matula is in the early stages of producing a sequel to the documentary as well as a screenplay version of the original. Money in college sports is the story of the moment. Not everyone likes that. But from the perspective of major donors to Matula and SMU: How much would you pay for your favorite team to win another big time? Can anyone really put a price tag on this?

“In college football you can get more and more cynical as the years go by because it’s more about the money,” Matula said. “But at SMU, there’s a kind of beautiful purity just beneath the surface. Winning is more important than money. It was a purely business decision to raise the ACC funds so quickly.”

(Top photo illustration: Michael Hickey / Getty Images)