Originally Posted by
Olympic Fan
There is NO chance that UNC will get the death penalty.
There is almost no chance that the death penalty will ever be levied again -- to anybody.
I've been wondering about this -- not specifically with reference to UNC (I agree they likely won't get the death penalty), but in general.
There seems to be a conventional wisdom that after the NCAA hit SMU football with the death penalty in 1987 and SMU became irrelevant for a generation, everyone took a step back and said, "Whoa..." and decided the death penalty was just too big an axe to swing, and therefore likely won't ever be swung again.
I'm not so sure. That is, I don't disagree that this conventional wisdom exists, or that it might prevent the NCAA from ever using the death penalty again.
I'm just not sure about the validity of the conventional wisdom.
It wasn't just the death penalty that killed SMU football. It was the death penalty, plus at least two other things.
First, after the NCAA lowered the hammer, SMU did a major housecleaning from top to bottom. New president, new trustees, new athletic director and staff, new everything. And they de-emphasized football for a long time. Now, given the degree of corruption at SMU, these were probably necessary and appropriate steps. But it was those steps, as much as anything else, that handicapped SMU football and made it an also-ran (at best) for so long.
With the restrictions that SMU's new management put on the football program, there was just no way they could field a competitive team. And I'm not just talking about restrictions that said, "Hey, no more slush funds to pay players." The new brass at SMU imposed tight academic requirements, cut the program's budget, and took a number of other steps that really hampered SMU's ability to rebuild a competitive program. There were just a lot of things that SMU just couldn't do, even though they would've been completely within the rules, to try and keep up with other programs.
The other thing that really hurt SMU was the demise of the Southwest Conference. In 1990, a year after SMU resumed football, Arkansas left to join the SEC, touching off a domino effect of realignment as the major conferences began looking to negotiate their own TV deals and expand their footprints to increase the value of their potential deals. (The same year the SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina, Penn State joined the Big Ten.)
Reduced to a footprint of a single state, the SWC was ripe for cannibalization. The death blow came a few years later when its two biggest properties, Texas and Texas A&M, left (along with Baylor and Texas Tech) for the Big Eight, which became the Big 12. The remaining SWC members (including SMU) were left without a major conference home, and spun off one by one to mid-major leagues like the WAC and Conference USA. Without a major conference to carry it, any hope SMU had of returning to the upper echelon of college football programs was effectively dead.
So yes, the death penalty unquestionably hurt SMU. But it wasn't just the death penalty that truly killed SMU for a generation. It was a combination of the death penalty and other events and circumstances -- some of which SMU imposed on itself, but some of which were beyond its control.
"I swear Roy must redeem extra timeouts at McDonald's the day after the game for free hamburgers." --Posted on InsideCarolina, 2/18/2015