SMU Still Trying to Live Down Image : College football: Effects of NCAA death penalty are felt by Mustangs seven years later.

Like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, it’s always there. S, for Southern Methodist. S for scandal.

No school’s football program had been given the death penalty by the NCAA before SMU got it in 1987. None has since.

The guilty are gone now and players are no longer given cars and cash.

But the legacy remains.

“We try to put it behind us,” said Tom Rossley, who became coach three seasons ago. “We try not to make mention of it too much, but it’s obvious that a lot of people want to talk about it.”

It’s as much a part of the school’s history as Don Meredith and Doak Walker.

“It’s difficult because, on the one hand, you want to put the past behind you,” said Charles Howard, SMU’s compliance officer. “But on the other hand, you want to learn from it so you don’t repeat your mistakes.”

The lessons are part of the legacy, and also part of the reason for diminished expectations. SMU is 11-45-2 since resuming football with a 1989 team that included 74 freshmen and lost to Houston, 95-21.

Even today’s seniors, recruited two years into the new era and largely unwanted by other programs, became cannon-fodder by necessity. There simply wasn’t anybody else.

“It was tough for me because I was one of those guys who didn’t get a chance to be redshirted,” said Erwin Wilburn, a wide receiver. “I got thrown into the fire early.”

In the second quarter of the first game of his freshman season, Wilburn became an instant starter when Brian Berry was injured. Arkansas won that game, 17-6, in a season in which SMU beat only Tulane.

Tulane was the only other school that recruited Erwin Wilburn.

The Mustangs lost their season opener to Arkansas last week, 34-14, and are heavy underdogs against UCLA on Saturday in the Rose Bowl.

Bowl games are a memory. So are some of the alumni.

Even the innocent are scrutinized because of the lingering thought: Could it happen again? It’s the reason Howard feels a stab of fear every time he sees a player driving a car, and it’s one of the causes of the lack of football talent at the university.

The NCAA requires at least a 700 score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. SMU requires a 900, with special cases under that referred to a review committee.

“As a small, private school and because of our academic standards, it makes it real difficult for us to get junior college players, which is the thing you’d think you’d want to do to help allow younger players to mature and still get us back on a competitive level,” Rossley said.

After a 2-7-2 season in 1993, SMU could use a few.

“Some people think we go too far in our admission standards,” Howard said. “Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with that, but some people think there is.”

One is Craig James, with Eric Dickerson part of the “Pony Backfield” that brought Southwest Conference championships to SMU in the early 1980s. James, a member of the board of directors of the Mustang Club, a group of boosters, is an ESPN commentator.

“Yes, we did go too far the other way, but did we have to?” he said. “I think the academic side of the institution was so worried about the reputation of the school that (the late) Kenneth Pye, the president at the time, knew he had to implement a very tough standard for the athletes. We were trying to be the Harvard of the South.

“SMU is an excellent academic school, but it’s not Harvard and it’s not Stanford. The kids we have to recruit, if they are qualified to go to SMU and they are that talented at football, they’d go to Stanford before they’d go to SMU. They’d go to Notre Dame or one of the high-powered schools that is a great academic institution too. So we’re not being realistic with ourselves, in my opinion.”

He cites the case of Bam Morris, the Doak Walker Award winner as the nation’s top running back last season at Texas Tech. His cousin, Ron Morris, played at SMU in the good--or bad--old days.

“Bam Morris cried when he couldn’t go to SMU,” James said. “It wasn’t that he was illiterate or anything. He scored something like 750 or 800 on the SAT, so he couldn’t qualify for SMU and he wanted to come here.”

Instead, he qualified to rush for 222 yards in Texas Tech’s 41-24 victory over SMU last season.

Games like that make it tough for Steve Wilensky, executive director of the Mustang Club, to raise money for athletics. Donations had risen to $1.6 million in SMU’s heyday, then fell to $400,000 when football was felled.

The Mustang Club was back up to $1.4 million two years ago when the word came down from the board of trustees, through Pye, that the club had to raise $1.6 million a year to keep football at the Division I-A level. Three weeks after this year’s fund drive began, the Southwest Conference announced it was breaking up. The haves--Texas, Texas A&M;, Texas Tech and Baylor--would join the Big Eight. The have-nots would have to fend for themselves.

That’s how SMU wound up in the Western Athletic Conference.

“We’re going to try to convince recruits that trips to Hawaii and San Diego are a lot nicer than going to Ames, Iowa, or Manhattan, Kan.,” Rossley said.

It may be a tough sell in Texas. When Texas A&M; and other schools followed SMU down the sanctions trail--though the others were left breathing after the investigations ended--athletes left the state in droves, UCLA becoming one of the beneficiaries. Those who stayed were lured by the tradition of Texas A&M; and Texas.

“In the old days, we could recruit with A&M;, Texas, anybody,” James said. “I’m not aware that we are out-recruiting anybody now.”

Said Wilensky: “Well, we’re getting some from Texas Tech and Baylor. But we’ve got to go some to get them away from Texas and A&M.;”

The question is whether SMU is willing to go some, or should. Days when money grew on recruiting trees and high school seniors would accept a Trans-Am from one school and drive it to another are vivid in the memories of those who went through them.

So is the resentment.

“Everybody looks at SMU like these guys are driving Lincoln Continentals and all,” James said. “Well, we were guilty of what we did, but I played (in the NFL) with players from every university in America and the cheating was all over. . . . It just happened that SMU got selected and got hammered.”

And now it’s up to Rossley, who takes what he is given and tries to win with it. He has an 8-24-2 record in three-plus seasons and in August was given a four-year contract extension because he had met goals in graduation rates and his team was perceived as on the way up.

“We’re on a mission,” he said. “I think we’ve grown to the point in the program where there are more people with their eyes on us and they’re thinking, ‘Maybe this team is about ready to take a giant step.’ ”

If so, it’s the thinking that’s changed. The eyes of Texas--and the NCAA--have been on SMU for a long time. That scarlet S stands out.