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.
