Explain to me what killed the SWC?

[DonkeyCigars 143]

16 hours ago, Tex Pete said:

If Texas was cheating, we were doing a terrible job of it. 

Makes sense why we are doing a terrible job of NIL, I guess. It's our culture.

[dcar00 14995]

Sec championship game

[BillyGoatHill 4421]

5 hours ago, Longboard Horn said:

 

Aggy under Sherrill was as bad or worse than what SMU did. Only reason they didn't get the death penalty is that the NCAA new how bad it affected SMU's program and was never going to do that to another school (unfortunately).

[Armybrat 41442]

2 minutes ago, BillyGoatHill said:

Aggy under Sherrill was as bad or worse than what SMU did. Only reason they didn't get the death penalty is that the NCAA new how bad it affected SMU's program and was never going to do that to another school (unfortunately).

Yep, then that POS did the same shit when he went to Mississippi State.

[NAVY 6973]

Check out this bad boy 

[ImissWallyPryor 9046]

I shared a hunting lease for 5 years with an SMU grad who played football with Dickerson and CJK5H.  I first met him at a meet-n-greet, and he wasted no time informing me that he hated Texas (he also came from a Sooner family).

This guy wasn’t even close to a blue chip as a recruit, but he ended up starting for at least 2 seasons. He didn’t get bags dropped at his feet as a high schooler, and he would never say if he received anything illegal as a starter.

We were getting liquored up at deer camp one night while SMU was serving their death penalty, and one of the guys (who was not from a SWC school) asked him about the rampant cheating at SMU. He said that players were always sharing stories, and that it wasn’t just SMU (obviously).  It was the usual suspects: SMU, OU, OSU, UH, TCU, and let’s not forget aggy. I don’t recall him mentioning anything about Tech, but he specifically said that his teammates mocked Fred Akers for his canned speech about the honor of representing the state of Texas by becoming a Longhorn. He would have gladly rubbed it in my nose if Texas was in that same group of cheaters.

I’m not saying there weren’t plenty of $50 handshakes (inflation lol) or  occasional illegal inducements (cowboy boots for a guy named Marcus), nor am I forgetting all the drinks at the bars that the players never seemed to pay for. But, Texas wasn’t playing the game at anywhere near the same level as the usual suspects. If we were, coaches and guys like Dickerson would have turned on us in no time.*

*Not that it would have mattered since Texas controls everything. 

Edited July 26, 2021 by ImissWallyPryor

[ImissWallyPryor 9046]

I forgot to mention LSU as being one of the usual suspects.

Another thing he mentioned is that aggy was unique in that they - like all cults - were insular. They would kill themselves before they turned on each other to an outsider. 

Edited July 26, 2021 by ImissWallyPryor

[Paul Wesley 3313]

3 hours ago, BillyGoatHill said:

Aggy under Sherrill was as bad or worse than what SMU did. Only reason they didn't get the death penalty is that the NCAA new how bad it affected SMU's program and was never going to do that to another school (unfortunately).

This cannot be quoted enough.

Aggies were coming off multiple NCAA sanctions and were known to be major offenders.  FOUR DAYS after their most recent sanctions had been announced, they FedExed cash (obvious hush money) to a disgruntled former running back, who took it to the Dallas Morning News to open it.  The return address was from the Aggie coaching staff, for fuck's sake.  I mean, it's no different than Clements' "we had a payroll" shit at SMU.  They were going to keep right on cheating as long as the program existed (which they obviously did).

 

 

 

[MaybeACoordinator 8350]

The cheating was just a tool...

The networks wanted the SWC broken up long before they succeeded in doing so. When told the contrary, the old-school redass BMDs dug in with their awl money and their Texan pride and told the networks one state plus Arkansas was enough, and when the Pigs left, Texas was enough on its own.

There was this belief among that generation that the state of Texas had unlimited football powers -- I mean, just a few years ago, you had Dan Jenkins, a very smart guy but very much of his era, telling people that it didn't matter how many blue chip recruits went out of state or that Texas high schools are now expected to roster up 12 FBS programs -- our HS talent is infinite. That's just not true -- for a while that seemed to be the case with Florida, but what we've seen there is that you can really only have two elite schools in one state at any one time, and that's pushing it. (If you look back over the decades of Gator, Nole and Cane dominance, there was never a year where all three of them were truly elite at the same time, and now that they are having to compete with all those other FBS schools., they are lucky to have one elite team a year.)

So back then the BMDs at schools like SMU and aggy and some of our own were dug in on the idea that the SWC could thrive and survive on the level of football our teams played here and for the first half of the '80s, it was working. Yes, Texas had a bunch of D-1 schools, but realistically, only UT, UH, and aggy with much of a recent past, and SMU with lots of money and clout at the time.  

Then the networks sicced the NCAA on us and it all fell apart. We sucked even while cheating, SMU was executed, aggy was allowed to cheat but even so they are still aggy, Bill Yeoman got old and too lazy to even hide his cheating, and the trickle of blue chips going to schools like Miami, Colorado, the Pac Ten, Notre Dame and elsewhere turned into a firehose. It wasn't that we were losing most dudes to LSU or more than usual to Oklahoma or a bunch of the best of the best to one school like today's Alabama -- they were going all over the place.

There wasn't a legit national title contender at all out of the SWC from our 1983 team through the end of the conference in '96. Effectively we were no longer a Power 5 conference in all those years. 

The NCAA gave SMU the death penalty and not aggy because SMU didn't fit in the networks' future plans and aggy did. 

We should have taken note of this and realized it also applied to us and acted accordingly, but those awful days are behind us now. We re-exerted our dominance from 1998 on and are on the cusp of doing it again.  

[bullet 1631]

1 hour ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

The cheating was just a tool...

The networks wanted the SWC broken up long before they succeeded in doing so. When told the contrary, the old-school redass BMDs dug in with their awl money and their Texan pride and told the networks one state plus Arkansas was enough, and when the Pigs left, Texas was enough on its own.

There was this belief among that generation that the state of Texas had unlimited football powers -- I mean, just a few years ago, you had Dan Jenkins, a very smart guy but very much of his era, telling people that it didn't matter how many blue chip recruits went out of state or that Texas high schools are now expected to roster up 12 FBS programs -- our HS talent is infinite. That's just not true -- for a while that seemed to be the case with Florida, but what we've seen there is that you can really only have two elite schools in one state at any one time, and that's pushing it. (If you look back over the decades of Gator, Nole and Cane dominance, there was never a year where all three of them were truly elite at the same time, and now that they are having to compete with all those other FBS schools., they are lucky to have one elite team a year.)

So back then the BMDs at schools like SMU and aggy and some of our own were dug in on the idea that the SWC could thrive and survive on the level of football our teams played here and for the first half of the '80s, it was working. Yes, Texas had a bunch of D-1 schools, but realistically, only UT, UH, and aggy with much of a recent past, and SMU with lots of money and clout at the time.  

Then the networks sicced the NCAA on us and it all fell apart. We sucked even while cheating, SMU was executed, aggy was allowed to cheat but even so they are still aggy, Bill Yeoman got old and too lazy to even hide his cheating, and the trickle of blue chips going to schools like Miami, Colorado, the Pac Ten, Notre Dame and elsewhere turned into a firehose. It wasn't that we were losing most dudes to LSU or more than usual to Oklahoma or a bunch of the best of the best to one school like today's Alabama -- they were going all over the place.

There wasn't a legit national title contender at all out of the SWC from our 1983 team through the end of the conference in '96. Effectively we were no longer a Power 5 conference in all those years. 

The NCAA gave SMU the death penalty and not aggy because SMU didn't fit in the networks' future plans and aggy did. 

We should have taken note of this and realized it also applied to us and acted accordingly, but those awful days are behind us now. We re-exerted our dominance from 1998 on and are on the cusp of doing it again.  

Well said.

[Nueces River Rat 5799]

7 hours ago, BillyGoatHill said:

Aggy under Sherrill was as bad or worse than what SMU did. Only reason they didn't get the death penalty is that the NCAA new how bad it affected SMU's program and was never going to do that to another school (unfortunately).

I think OUSux getting in trouble in the late 80’s sucked the air out of the media coverage.  Recall they had multiple scandals going at the same time. 

[hpslugga 4097]

21 hours ago, BillyGoatHill said:

Aggy under Sherrill was as bad or worse than what SMU did. Only reason they didn't get the death penalty is that the NCAA new how bad it affected SMU's program and was never going to do that to another school (unfortunately).

The effects of the DP were hardly visible at the time as SMU was serving a self-imposed 1-year ban the year after it had received the DP. In fact those effects weren't going to be seen visibly for about a generation or so when people started to realize that shit wasn't going to get better for them for a long time.

Anyways, Jackie Sherrill's actions, while tremendously stupid, was the only major infraction that he committed. A&M was, therefore, not even eligible to be considered for the death penalty. As a matter of fact, the formal rule is called the "repeat violator rule," which A&M was not subject to as they'd not been previously busted with major NCAA infractions of a similar nature in the preceding 5 years. 

[hpslugga 4097]

15 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

That's just not true -- for a while that seemed to be the case with Florida, but what we've seen there is that you can really only have two elite schools in one state at any one time, and that's pushing it. (If you look back over the decades of Gator, Nole and Cane dominance, there was never a year where all three of them were truly elite at the same time, and now that they are having to compete with all those other FBS schools., they are lucky to have one elite team a year.)

While I agree with the general sentiment, there actually was one such year: 1994. In 1994, they finished 4th, 6th, and 7th. Miami played against the eventual national champion Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, Florida was the preseason #1, and FSU was the defending national champion. FSU's lone loss of that season was, in fact, Miami and of course there was also that famous Choke at the Doak tie with Florida.

But yes, you're generally correct. While we were treated to some top-ranked showdowns at the end of the year between the Noles and Gators in the mid-90's, finding such showdowns in other states in other eras is really hard. In fact you can literally count the number of such showdowns between Texas and aggy on one hand. Same goes for the Iron Bowl, same goes for the Apple Cup, Civil War, etc. Those are hard to come by, I absolutely agree.

 

[MaybeACoordinator 8350]

31 minutes ago, hpslugga said:

While I agree with the general sentiment, there actually was one such year: 1994. In 1994, they finished 4th, 6th, and 7th. Miami played against the eventual national champion Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, Florida was the preseason #1, and FSU was the defending national champion. FSU's lone loss of that season was, in fact, Miami and of course there was also that famous Choke at the Doak tie with Florida.

But yes, you're generally correct. While we were treated to some top-ranked showdowns at the end of the year between the Noles and Gators in the mid-90's, finding such showdowns in other states in other eras is really hard. In fact you can literally count the number of such showdowns between Texas and aggy on one hand. Same goes for the Iron Bowl, same goes for the Apple Cup, Civil War, etc. Those are hard to come by, I absolutely agree.

 

I researched that a year or two ago and vaguely remembered there had been one such year...the one year I spent exactly zero days in America, in between two more I spent only a couple of months...the sum total I knew of college football from those years came via cassette tapes my dad would send me of Horn games two weeks after they were played. (And they were usually losses....)