For those who lived through SMU’s death penalty and helped the university rise from it, even 40 years later, it’s still difficult to talk about.
Half a dozen filmmakers and another handful of authors approached SMU Board of Trustees Chair David Miller over the last decade seeking to tell the Mustangs’ story in full — from being dealt the NCAA’s most extreme punishment to their 40-year journey back to power-conference status.
“Initially, I declined all of them,” Miller told The Dallas Morning News this week. “You can’t tell the story without diving deeply back into the whole death penalty thing, and we’ve worked so hard to move past that. Resurrecting it wasn’t particularly exciting to me.”
But now 15 years after SMU was last on the big screen when “Pony Excess” aired as an ESPN 30 for 30, the Mustangs are returning to the spotlight.
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On Sept. 21 at 2 p.m. CT, ESPN will air “Thunder On: Resurgence of the SMU Mustangs,” a feature documentary that picks up where “Pony Excess” left off and shows how SMU overcame the most severe punishment in sports history to ultimately return to college football’s biggest stage last season in reaching the College Football Playoff.
After declining many opportunities for the Mustangs to be featured in similar projects, Miller came around once approached by Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, which chose to partner with Texas Crew Productions and director Chip Rives.
Rives, an Emmy and Peabody Award winner, previously worked on ESPN 30 for 30’s “Brian and the Boz” and “Phi Slama Jama,” among many other documentary projects.
“As Kirk Herbstreit says in the film, it truly is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of not only college football but sports,” Rives said. “SMU has this amazing story. A lot of people wanted it to be told.”
SMU alumnus Thaddeus Matula, who directed “Pony Excess,” is also an executive producer on the new documentary.
Rives told The News the intention was not to create a sequel to the 2010 film. “Pony Excess” featured bombshell interviews from former players and coaches from SMU’s teams in the 1980s detailing how university officials, coaches and boosters were involved in directly paying players, leading to the program’s downfall when it became the first and only college athletics program to be served the NCAA’s death penalty on Feb. 25, 1987.
SMU did not play football in the 1987 and 1988 seasons as a result of sanctions.
Only 15 minutes of the near-two hour film focuses on life after death and all SMU had to overcome when its football program was shut down. It concludes by showing SMU making and winning its first bowl game post-death penalty in 2009.
But since the film aired, the Mustangs have had back-to-back 11-win seasons, returned to a power conference by joining the ACC, reached the ACC championship game and made the College Football Playoff for the first time. Through the transfer portal, NIL and years of persistence, the Mustangs have managed to return to the national spotlight.
“The perfect storm of these three events happening at SMU at this time has created a situation where they can immediately start to compete with the true blue bloods of the sport,” Rives said. “The timing just felt right. Why wait for something like this when it’s happening right now?”
“Thunder On: Resurgence of the SMU Mustangs” — which went from idea to finished product in just six months — will feature new voices not included in “Pony Excess,” including former Dallas Morning News reporter Jean-Jacques Taylor and current columnist Kevin Sherrington, as well as current coaches and players like Rhett Lashlee and Kevin Jennings. It will highlight the challenges SMU faced from 1989-2024, not just as a football program, but as a university as a whole.
“There’s just no debate that college athletic success helps drive the overall brand of the university,” Miller said. “It’s not just about sports. It impacts the way the university is perceived nationally.
“Our applications for enrollment year-over-year are up 60%. That’s about being in the ACC, our success on the football field and on the basketball court but principally about getting back to power conference status. We’re relevant again.”
Still 40 years later, it isn’t easy for those at SMU to talk about the school’s darkest times.
But now on the other side of it, they’re able to see how their comeback story is one worth making not one, but two movies about.
“What I’m most excited about is how we have rebounded, how we have been resilient, how the fan base and people have stuck with this institution through thick and thin,” SMU athletic director Damon Evans said. “That’s what this documentary is going to highlight. We went through our tough time, but we didn’t give up on ourselves. We didn’t give up on each other. And we learned a lot of valuable lessons from that.”
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