DALLAS — As SMU continues to find success in its first ACC season — now the winner of six of its last seven games and flirting with a potential NCAA Tournament berth — consider the wide-lens perspective of oilman David Miller, who watched the Mustangs beat Stanford on Saturday on the very court that bears his name.

Nearly four decades after the football program’s two-year shutdown as part of the NCAA’s so-called death penalty, Miller sees the great irony in the arc of college sports history. SMU became the symbol of college athletics run amok in the 1980s, with a steady stream of dollars flowing illegally to athletes and then-Texas Gov. Bill Clements famously declaring that the program had a “payroll to meet.”

But now it’s the NIL era — “Now It’s Legal,” as the quip goes — and everyone has a payroll to meet. SMU’s swath of millionaire and billionaire boosters, many of whom have been waiting decades for this new paradigm, are poised to super-charge the private school’s arrival in a power league.

SMU is an ACC school with SEC DNA. Four decades ago, the behavior of its well-heeled boosters made the school a pariah. In today’s landscape, similar behavior, now above board, can make SMU something else: An ACC contender. “We are going to play the game hard,” Miller told Hoops HQ. The 6-foot-8 Miller, who has donated more than $100 million to his alma mater and spearheaded SMU’s entrance into a power conference, is among many SMU donors with deep pockets and long memories.

A member of SMU’s 1972 Southwest Conference championship basketball team, Miller, now chair of the university’s board of trustees, remembers how the 1987 death penalty — a punishment so harsh that the NCAA never levied it again — decimated the football program. Since those dark days, the men’s basketball program has been largely devoid of success (save for an uptick during the Larry Brown and Tim Jankovich eras) as the team bounced from the Western Athletic Conference to Conference USA to the American Athletic Conference over the past three decades.

Power league membership has its privileges, of course. And SMU donors were eager to dig deep in their pockets just to get the coveted seat at a power conference table. They didn’t flinch over having to forgo ACC television revenue — some $24 million annually — for nine years as part of the deal to join the league. In fact, in just the first five days after the ACC announcement in September 2023, SMU raised $100 million.

Rick Hart, the school’s athletic director, told Hoops HQ that the school’s donors are the great differentiator from most other schools in the ACC. As the NIL era approaches its fourth birthday, and a potential revenue-sharing model looms in which schools will be able to share up to $20.5 million annually with athletes, Hart said, “We are well positioned.”

That’s a stark contrast with the rest of the ACC. This once-proud league with its blueblood programs and historic influence on the rise of college basketball is having its worst season in decades. While the rest of college sports understood the new NIL paradigm was coming whether they liked it or not and embraced it accordingly, the vast majority of ACC schools — with the exception of those two stalwarts, Duke and North Carolina, as well as Louisville — stayed out of the fray. The basketball programs are paying dearly for their unwillingness (or inability?) to pony up the cash. While the SEC this season boasts arguably the most dominant conference in the history of the sport, the ACC at the moment has just two surefire NCAA Tournament teams in Duke and Louisville.  

Thus, SMU is joining the league at the exact right time. Its collection of big-money boosters can enable the school’s men’s basketball program to compete with most everyone in the league with an NIL pool currently ballparked by sources as between $3 and $4 million.

SMU Mustangs guard Chuck Harris (#3) takes a jump shot during the college basketball game
SMU is joining the league at the exact right time
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

The NIL commitment is the non-negotiable component in this brave new college sports world. While first-year SMU Coach Andy Enfield, who was introduced last April, says he never would have left USC for SMU if the school wasn’t joining the ACC, he was also emboldened by the pledge of support by SMU’s boosters. They assured him they were going all-in. That empowered him to win his share of transfer portal bidding wars and build an upper echelon team in quick fashion.

When SMU hired Enfield last spring, Miller said, they were so “laser-focused” on him that he was the only prospective coach they talked to. Miller had played golf with Enfield in the Los Angeles area a few years ago, so a relationship had already been established. Miller recalled Enfield telling him, “You keep saying you want to be competitive in the ACC, but I’m not interested in the job unless I know I’m going to have the resources to be competitive against the Dukes, North Carolinas and Virginias.” 

Miller’s assurances were enough for Enfield, who was on tenuous ground at USC after going 8-12 in the Pac-12 and missing out on the NCAA Tournament, to make the leap. “There is no question that we’re in this game to compete at the absolute highest level,” Miller said. “You’re talking about competing against the SEC, the Big Ten, as well as the ACC and Big 12. It’s going to take serious commitment from people. It’s going to take a serious level of investment — no doubt. Thankfully, we have an incredibly generous donor base. If you’re not competitive from an NIL standpoint, you’re just not going to attract that type of talent.”

SMU Mustangs head coach Andy Enfield calls a play
First-year SMU Coach Andy Enfield was introduced last April
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Enfield, who led Florida Gulf Coast to the Sweet 16 in 2013 and stewarded USC to the Elite Eight in 2021, had a great quality of life in Southern California, not to mention four years remaining on his contract. To change jobs, he said, he needed to have a “comfort level that basketball will be supported at SMU, and that was certainly explained to us.”

“Since we’ve been here, it’s been incredible,” Enfield told Hoops HQ. “They made very clear they want to compete in the ACC and give us the necessary resources. You can’t get that level of talent without strong support from your university. In today’s world with the NIL collective and revenue sharing, it’s hard to compete at the highest level year after year if you don’t have that.”

Enfield knows this is a radically new world in college basketball. It’s become almost a necessity for a coach to rebuild his roster every year. Enfield looked at SMU and felt he could build a competitive team a lot faster than they would have been able to years ago. His current roster is laden with 10 newcomers. And success on the recruiting trail has already been notable, with next year’s recruiting class ranked No. 6 nationally, according to ESPN. The haul includes four top-100 players, three of whom hail from Texas: Jermaine O’Neal Jr. and Jaden Toombs from the Dallas area, and Nigel Walls from Houston. 

The football team’s success in its inaugural ACC season — SMU earned a berth in the first 12-team College Football Playoff — was important, Hart said, because it demonstrated to donors the “power of their investment” and what was possible when programs are equipped to compete at the top of the ACC. “Excitement is at an all-time high,” Hart said. 

This was the vision. It’s why, in 2022, Miller and influential donors created the Power Conference Task Force to court leaders from power leagues. It’s why Miller criss-crossed the country on his Challenger 300 private plane the last few years for meetings with key power brokers. The day SMU received the ACC invitation, the first words out of Miller’s mouth were: “We’re back where we belong.”

“We ended up with the death penalty and lost our way for a couple decades,” Miller said. “But we’re just tickled to be back in this place.”