DALLAS — The death penalty’s grip on SMU has been cold and steely. David Miller knows.
In 1987, the man who can be looked upon as the modern-day savior of SMU football was 15 years out of college, and the former Mustangs basketball star was overseeing an oil and gas company in Denver he had co-founded.
That winter, the gushers were replaced with a (figurative) blow to the noggin. The NCAA shut down the SMU football program in what remains the most infamous infractions case in history. There were widespread illegal cash payments with players essentially being on payroll.
Spare the clap back about the name, image and likeness irony of it all being allowed these days. It happened, and at that moment, it defined not only the school but its entire athletics department. SMU would cease to be seen as a major college football program.
“There was some ugliness around the whole thing. I didn’t disconnect [with the university] but …,” Miller paused, sipping coffee in his fifth-floor office that overlooks the city. “I’ll share something with you.”
It is then Miller goes off the record.
Today, Miller is the chairman of the SMU board of trustees, the driving force behind the school’s entry into the ACC this season. Back then, though, it’s fair to say there were scores of SMU fans and power brokers who were angry and embarrassed with the boosters, coaches and players. Heck, even the governor of Texas back then, Bill Clements, was involved in the payments.
“I feel like I got paid,” Miller told CBS Sports. “I got a full scholarship and a hellaciously good education. That’s the foundation of my business success. On the heels of my basketball experience, I was awarded a full tuition fellowship to go to graduate school.
“This notion that athletes need to be paid [today], I really kind of resented it.”
Old school? Sure. Ironic? Absolutely. In fact, in these modern times, the notion of player compensation has been flipped on its dented head since the scandal. If not for Miller riding in on a Mustang to the rescue, SMU wouldn’t be part of the anointed (the 68 Power Four conference schools that hold the key to whatever the sport looks like in the future).
All it took was $270 million. That’s the cumulative amount SMU is raising to fund its athletic program for the next nine years in the ACC. Last year, the school agreed to join the conference for … nothing; no media rights revenue will be distributed to SMU. The Mustangs will get ACC bowl and NCAA Tournament payouts, but beyond that, they are basically playing on their dime.
Approximately $125 million of it is raised, enough to fund SMU athletics for the next five years.
That’s a first in the realignment era but was probably inevitable at some point. Desperate times call for desperate measures as the doors quickly close on Power Four membership. This one involved SMU buying its way into the big time.
“There’s been a lot written about how we gave up $30 million [per year] for nine years,” Miller said. “I will tell you it’s hard to take the position that you gave up something that you didn’t have and furthermore — this is key — that we were never going to get.”
There really was no alternative. Call it paying for the original sin that led to the death penalty. That scandal was caused by an ungodly and improper infusion of cash. Its impact is about to be swiped left by a similar distribution of funds.
Miller saw to it.
“I wasn’t trying to be a big dog,” he said of the cash it is taking to push SMU into the ACC, “but I said I wasn’t losing any sleep over it.”
Miller, 73, knows how to raise money. The billionaire founded EnCap Investments, a powerful oil and gas private equity firm. Twenty years ago, he was appointed to the National Petroleum Council and became an advisor to the Secretary of Energy. The 6-foot-8 Miller had been involved with the university almost from the time he picked up a basketball playing for Bob Prewitt in 1969. He was part of a Southwest Conference championship team in 1972.
Miller’s name is on the Moody Coliseum court; that’s what $100 million-plus in donations will get you.
Miller has been on the board of trustees for 16 years. Two years ago, he became board chair. That’s when the course of the 113-year-old university changed. Sensing the future and having the resources, Miller helped form what was called the Power Conference Task Force with a core of about 15 trustees.
Beginning in Spring 2022, the push was on. Miller took his eight-passenger Challenger 300 private plane and began touring the country like a candidate running for office.
“I went to Eugene, Winston-Salem, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta. I found a really receptive audience,” he said. “Two out of three people I met with knew quite a bit about SMU and had a very powerful sense of SMU. Washington State, Oregon, they, in particular, didn’t know about SMU.”
We all know how they ended up.
The initiative was very much like a campaign. SMU president Gerald Turner chatted up his CEO peers in other conferences. Athletic director Rick Hart did the same with his peers. It was Miller who could hit the real influencers — those big-cigar boosters who controlled the giving and purse strings at other schools.
It helped open doors that endowments at those other institutions may have been investing in EnCap. The stakes were obvious for a school that had played in four conferences since the death penalty. Basically, what was on the table was SMU’s relevancy 37 years later.
Don’t ask why it took this long for a school loaded with those resources and billionaires to get back in the big time. Once again, Miller went off the record, saying only, “We had a great story to tell. We simply had to be more proactive about telling it.”
The entire school’s image was at stake, too. FBS is the highest division of major college football with 134 members. But the Power Four is a designation of conferences defined by the leagues themselves and the networks who pay them. They are worth the most because of brand recognition. To that select group goes special access to the postseason — bowls, College Football Playoff — because of perceived market value and historic relevancy.
SMU was one of those until the death penalty. It had won 11 Southwest Conference titles. Heisman winner Doak Walker (1948) eventually lent his name to the award for the nation’s top running back. Eric Dickerson finished third in Heisman voting in 1982.
“You take this athletic program that has this deep and rich athletic history that all the sudden is relevant,” Miller said. “No four-star or five–star football or basketball player coming straight out of high school is going to go to a non-power school. No matter how fast you talk or how much you smile, it just ain’t going to happen.”
As Miller Over America wore on, the conclusion was the Big 12 wasn’t interested.
“Guess what? I get it,” Miller said. “Truth be known, if I’m TCU or Baylor, I’m not excited having elevated SMU’s status from a competitive standpoint.”
The Big Ten and SEC certainly didn’t want SMU. The school was eventually way down the road toward joining the Pac-12. According to Miller, former Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff told him that the first call for expansion would be to SMU after the media rights deal was finalized. (San Diego State would have been the other invitee, according Miller.)
We know how that ended up.
“We said, ‘OK, if we were ever, ever so fortunate as to have a choice, it would be the ACC,'” Miller said.
The school and its powerful media consultants created a dashboard for potential partners, some of the contents of which are revealed publicly here for the first time.
- SMU has the most wins (32) of any Texas school in the last four seasons among the Power Five conferences plus the AAC.
- Thirty-two percent of the athletic budget goes to football, which is “consistent with the allocation of top ACC members.”
- SMU is eighth in ACC endowment ($2 billion).
- It is in the top 6% nationally of best colleges for salary potential.
SMU met the ACC at the crossroads of opportunity and hustle. If nothing else, the addition of the Mustangs — along with Cal and Stanford — fortified conference membership. ESPN has the option of adjusting the value of the contract if membership dropped below 15 members. That “composition clause” is common in media rights deals.
Florida State currently exploring options to exit the conference hangs over the ACC like Godzilla tromping through Tokyo, but it’s less of a concern to SMU than you might think. That may or may not destabilize the conference and cause a new, cascading round of realignment.
Miller was asked if his school has any guarantee the league it joined will continue to exist in its current form.
“I don’t think we have any assurance,” he said. “I suspect you share this [view that realignment] isn’t over. There’s going to be reshuffling, [but] I’d much rather be on the inside looking out than the outside looking in. Now we just need to demonstrate to the world, fundamentally, that we deserve to be in.”
The ACC is thrilled to still be among the FBS elite as consolidation roils.
“It’s one thing to come forward and say, ‘We’re going to take no share or reduced share from the media deal for an extended period of time,’ ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said of SMU. “But that doesn’t work well if someone comes in already marginalized. SMU was pretty direct about their ability to raise funds … This would not be a major lift for them.”
Miller and Phillips first met in person at the College Football Playoff National Championship in January 2023 in Los Angeles. A partnership was formed.
“Jim said, ‘I’m not only familiar with SMU’s last 30-year history, I’m familiar with the last 100-year history,’ Miller said. “He said, ‘You’re a power conference school.'”
Eight months later, circumstances coalesced to prove that statement true. SMU agreed to join the ACC on Sept. 1, 2023. Five days later, 31 SMU supporters stepped forward to contribute $100 million to the cause, Miller said.
A revered academic powerhouse was amidst the biggest transition in school history. Not only could athletics now hang a different shingle, the deans of all seven SMU schools thanked Miller for helping the school attract “higher quality professors and higher quality students.”
“One of the deans [told me] he was interviewing a gentleman for an endowed professorship,” Miller added. “This candidate said to him, ‘I would never be here except for your involvement in the ACC.'”
The same was true of first-year basketball coach Andy Enfield. Miller and the coach had bonded after they played golf together a few years ago in Los Angeles. On March 21, SMU parted ways with Rob Lanier after two seasons. Miller asked a search firm executive about what sort of coaches would be interested in the opening.
“The first name out of his mouth of Andy Enfield,” Miller said.
Ten days later, Enfield left USC for the Mustangs.
According to 247Sports, the 2025 SMU football recruiting class is ranked 23rd nationally with four, four-star recruits. The Mustangs have won double-digit games twice in the past five seasons — 10 in 2019 under Sonny Dykes and 11 last season under Rhett Lashlee as the team won the AAC championship. It was the program’s first outright league title in 41 years.
SMU continually suffered under the death penalty. It was left behind the first time by the Big 12 in 1996 when the league formed, joining other Southwest Conference leftovers that didn’t make it when Texas, Baylor, Texas Tech and Texas A&M joined the existing Big Eight.
That was in the middle of a massive drought after the football program was kneecapped by the NCAA. The Mustangs won 13 total games in seven years before the Southwest Conference dissolved. There was one winning season from the time SMU football was reinstated in 1989 to coach June Jones’ — the spread guru who guided the Mustangs to four straight bowls — second season in 2009.
“That was all because of David Miller’s support!!!,” Jones texted from Hawaii, where he is enjoying retirement. “And I know [he was] the main reason the Big 12 even considered adding SMU [this time]. Even though he was a basketball player, he knew football had to win and be the major sport for the athletic department. David Miller is a giver!!”
Miller’s office here is in the Old Parkland Campus, former home of Parkland Hospital where President Kennedy was taken after he was shot in 1963. The land is owned by Crow Holdings, a real estate firm headed by chairman Harlan Crow, a powerful entrepreneurial and political figure. A daughter, Kathy, is on the SMU board of trustees.
The campus is dotted with impressive works of art, which includes a sculpture of the Flight 93 “Let’s Roll” heroes on 9/11 as well as a rendering of Harriet Tubman. There is a giant bust of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who helped discover COVID-19. The ground floor of Freedom Place, the name of Miller’s office building, could outclass some art galleries.
To put it bluntly, the place reeks of money and success.
That’s the backdrop that made the math easy for SMU. In realignment, you’re either “additive” or “dilutive.” The line above or below isn’t drawn with clarity. The likes of TCU, Utah and Houston eventually made it to Power Five salvation. With SMU jumping to the ACC, only Rice (currently in the AAC) has never made it from the old SWC to a power conference.
SMU was an academic fit anywhere with small, private enrollment (7,000 undergrad) and an elite business school. But in a state with 13 FBS programs, it had languished below the line until it found that welcome mat on Tobacco Road.
“I don’t want to make this too much about me, but it became obvious to me four, five, six months into [SMU’s push] that no conference was going to do anything that was dilutive,” Miller said. “My strong sense was SMU was attractive, Dallas was attractive, but the financial piece of it was going to be a big challenge because no one was going to give up a dollar.”
It won’t be until 2033 that SMU gets a dime of ACC media rights revenue. The CFP Management Committee (10 conference presidents plus Notre Dame) decided in February that SMU would receive less than a full playoff share that other Power Four schools were getting over the next two years. The figure was not released. SMU will get a full share beginning in 2026 when the new media rights agreement with ESPN begins.
SMU’s move is becoming more significant by the day. The Power Four commissioners are demanding a separate governance structure to more speedily pass legislation. Forget rules-making, SMU now has its nose under the tent.
For God, for country and forever(?), the Mustangs can dream of playing under the big top. The grip by the death penalty has been loosened.
The SMU story is an American story, a reminder in this fractured land that football still means everything.
“It’s part of our culture,” Miller said. “It’s not just Texas. It’s pervasive across this country. It is, in fact, a source of pride for universities that play the game and play it well.”
