Southern Methodist University has spent most of the past four decades in college football’s wilderness. A onetime powerhouse turned pariah, the Mustangs languished for years playing obscure rivals in second-tier leagues. Things got so bad that the SMU program’s most famous alum, NFL Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson, once suggested the university should drop the sport.
Now, however, SMU is competing for a national championship for the first time since Dickerson suited up in the early 1980s, when he led the team’s legendary Pony Express rushing attack. “We’re not a laughingstock anymore,” Dickerson recently told ESPN.
The current Mustang squad’s resurgence has been fueled by big dollars. Ironically, heavy spending—in the form of an illicit slush fund that paid for lavish player recruitment gifts—is what led to SMU’s undoing in 1987, when the NCAA handed out the “death penalty” for the first time in the sport’s history, shutting down the school’s football program for the year.
This time around, the money fueling the Mustangs’ football ambitions is aboveboard—and arrived, in part, thanks to an unusual business arrangement involving a collection of Texas billionaires who came together to back the team.
A $15 billion meeting
It’s near impossible to compete in the top echelons of college football without belonging to one of the sport’s four major conferences. Last year, after years of lobbying behind the scenes, SMU finally got a ticket back to the big time. It came from the Atlantic Coast Conference, known as the ACC, home to three-time national champion Clemson, as well as elite schools like Duke, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The offer came with a catch, however. SMU would have to forgo nine years of media rights payments, worth more than $200 million, for a seat at the table. SMU’s billionaire backers, however, hardly blinked.
Shortly before receiving the invite, David Miller, the chairman of the school’s board, quickly organized a meeting of 12 wealthy donors. The net worth in the room exceeded $15 billion, according to Yahoo Sports.
The group included oilman Ray Hunt, worth about $7 billion himself, and his nephew, Clark, owner of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Also in attendance were Rich Templeton and Marty Flanagan, the former CEOs of Texas Instruments and Invesco, respectively.
“It’s a couple hundred million dollars,” Miller, the founder of EnCap Investments, an oil and gas private equity firm, told Yahoo at the time. “I’m not losing sleep over it.”
The bet paid off quicker than most expected. SMU came within a last-second field goal of winning the ACC during its first season in the conference. More important, the team’s 11–2 campaign earned a No. 11 national ranking and a spot in the College Football Playoff, leaving heavyweights like Alabama and Miami outside of the 12-team field.
SMU is an eight and a half point underdog as it travels to take on Penn State in the first round of the tournament this Saturday. Four wins away from a title, however, it’s clear the Mustangs are back where their wealthy supporters believe they belong.
That includes Paul B. Loyd Jr., a former SMU football player who went on to serve as chairman and CEO of R&B Falcon, the world’s largest offshore drilling company before it merged with Swiss company Transocean.
“As a businessman, if you look at the rate of return on what we invested, that return is substantial,” he toldThe Athletic.
Loyd didn’t make any money off his donations, of course. His funds, however, have helped spur a lot more winning.