SMU officials call ACC a ‘top three’ conference, taking jab at Big 12

UNIVERSITY PARK — SMU athletic director Rick Hart couldn’t help it. He had to keep asking.

“Is this real?”

Even hours later, standing with SMU dignitaries including President R. Gerald Turner and board chairman David Miller, on a temporary stage at the Armstrong Fieldhouse, officially announcing the school was joining the Atlantic Coast Conference was hard for Hart to comprehend.

“It’s still a little surreal even right now,” said the athletic director, who has been an integral part of SMU’s long journey to a power conference since 2012. “So, disbelief, really.”

SMU officially joins the ACC on July 1, 2024, after its 11th season in the American Athletic Conference, followed by Stanford and Cal a month later.

It has been a long odyssey for the Mustangs, who along with TCU, Houston, and Rice were left without a conference when the Southwest Conference broke up in 1996. SMU spent nine years in the Western Athletic Conference and eight more in Conference USA.

Turner began his tenure on the Hilltop in the summer of 1995, with the late 1980s “Pony Excess” death penalty effects on the football program still lingering.

“It’s a very healing moment,” Turner said Friday. “There’s still a lot of resentment about that, as well as hurt feelings and everything else, and so the fact that the expansion that occurred and we weren’t part of that and [it was probably] tied back to the death penalty.

“This is sort of like a new beginning. It’s a fresh start. It’s an affirmation that the university’s athletic programs have come back, and this one is also an affirmation about the quality of the academic programs.”

Hart and Miller both took some swipes at the Big 12, to the delight of the several hundred SMU boosters, students, and fans on hand for the confetti-shooting announcement. The Big 12 is losing its two bell-cow schools, Texas and Oklahoma, to the SEC next season, and didn’t express interest in adding SMU, a school in its Irving-based backyard, when it expanded with four new schools this year.

“We’re finally back where we belong,” said Miller, who leads the 42-member Board of Trustees. “So here we are today a new member of one of the top three — remember what I said — one of the top three collegiate athletic conferences in the United States.”

The comment drew cheers from the crowd.

Miller said he even received a call from former President George W. Bush, whose presidential library is located on campus.

“When the history of SMU is written, this will be one of its finest moments,” he said Bush told him by phone from the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

With the three additional schools, the ACC will have 17 football teams and 18 teams in most other sports.

Neither Turner, Hart nor Miller would confirm reports that SMU will decline television revenue for its first nine years in the conference, but Turner pointed out that the ACC’s average revenue distribution (nearly $40 million last year) was money SMU was not earning in its deal with the American, which distributed $8.2 million in 2022, according to tax records.

“We’ve never had [that revenue] to start with,” he said. “At the level that we have been operating on, we’ll be increasing that over time and we’ll be getting it through the ACC also.”

He suggested that joining the ACC will add revenue in other forms, including the College Football Playoff fund, full revenue shares from the ACC Network, bowl payouts and financial incentives earned from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. TCU experienced similar windfalls when it moved to the Big 12.

Another possible revenue generator Turner said they’ve discussed with the ACC is University Park hosting Olympic sports competitions, taking advantage of Dallas’ central location and two major airports.

But for Turner, Miller, and Hart, the future details of the deal pale in comparison to the overwhelming benefits of the move.

“It’s really important to the SMU family that this has occurred, for a lot of reasons,” Turner said. “Many of these [current] students have no idea what the death penalty is, so it’s the older folk that this brings that kind of healing to today.”

Hart joked that he didn’t get any sleep Thursday night over concerns about the pending decision.

“It was a restless night. I didn’t know what to think,” he said. “A lot of speculation about what might or might not happen, who may or may not do what. I think it was about as cloudy as it’s been. I didn’t have a great sense for what was going to occur this morning.”

It has been a tortuous six weeks of handwringing for SMU, with their fate left in the hands of ACC member schools, not to mention the months when officials courted an invite from the Pac-12, before its August implosion.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” Hart said. “Distracting, frustrating, maddening, like a roller coaster ride. I think I did a pretty good job not to get emotionally invested in it often, but there are times when that’s hard to avoid. It took a toll.”

Turner, Miller, and other longtime Mustangs boosters, fans, and faculty still have harsh memories of the demise of the SWC.

“I grew up in Texas so the Southwest Conference was all I knew,” Turner said. “So for it to disappear was kind of like how the West Coast feels about losing the Pac-12. It was just something that had always been there and ought to be there. But it wasn’t.”

During his first year, it was hard to imagine SMU attracting a big-time conference.

The on-campus football stadium wasn’t ready for primetime. Moody Coliseum was in dire need of a facelift. The swimming and diving facilities need massive upgrades.

“I knew we had to have a long-range plan to replace all of those. Now, it took longer than I thought it would, but if I had gotten it done earlier, I’m not sure there would have been the opening” to join the ACC, Turner said. “You’ve got to be prepared however all of this craziness goes, and it’s not over.”

He said he expects there to be another “frenzy of things” with realignment whenever conference media deals come to an end.

“I don’t know if that is for the betterment of intercollegiate athletics but that’s kind of how it’s set up now,” Turner said. “ESPN and FOX have a lot of influence.”

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