'Oh, s---, here come all the billionaires': How SMU came back from the dead - ESPN

IN THE 1980s, SMU and Dallas became synonymous with free-flowing money in college football, a small school in a big city that turned into a playground for rich boosters who would spare no expense to make sure their team became a major player. It worked, albeit not for long. The Mustangs became pariahs, ultimately getting crushed by the NCAA's «death penalty» in 1987. SMU was the only program in history considered so corrupt that it had to be shut down.

If only those boosters could've fast-forwarded 40 years. The sins of SMU's past are now virtues in college football.

The money — NIL means Now It's Legal — is flowing again in Dallas, and SMU is in a major conference, the ACC, cutting an unprecedented deal to forgo television revenue for nearly a decade as a devoted group of deep-pocketed boosters pledges to cover the shortfall, while also funding a leading NIL collective. The Ponies are back in the game.

«We don't embrace the mistakes of our past,» Mustangs coach Rhett Lashlee said. «But we do embrace the history of our past.»

For all this to happen, it took power players who knew how to wheel and deal, lots of money and some Dallas bravado — all of which are in abundance on the Hilltop. Most schools make a conference move to get more television revenue, not less. But SMU just wanted a seat at the table. SMU's chairman of the board, David Miller, fired his metaphorical six-shooter in the air when he explained how the program could go without television revenue for nine years: The money didn't matter to them.

«It's a couple hundred million dollars,» Miller told Yahoo. «I'm not losing sleep over it.»

That's because this is college football in Texas, and none of it looks like a risk to people like oilman Bill Armstrong, a