Spring check-ins: Pony express

SMU had a great inaugural season in the ACC, can they follow it up?

The NIL era has been pretty kind to the SMU Mustangs. Despite existing in the heart of Dallas, TX, SMU has always been an old money rich school and not exactly a natural mascot for the city nor a program with a particularly big fanbase.

There are only 136k living alumni and around 61k in the DFW area, which now boasts a population of over eight million people. SMU doesn’t have a huge footprint, just a critical mass of rich alumni who care about football.

They’ve learned to leverage that advantage alongside the fact the campus is within the city of Dallas to turn themselves into a transfer portal magnet for Metroplex talent that decides playing football away from home isn’t is as great as they thought. They’ve won 11 games two seasons in a row and are 29-12 overall and 21-3 in regular season conference play since installing Rhett Lashlee as head coach before the 2022 season.

That recent success, along with returning the quarterback, has a lot of projection models and prognosticators believing in another playoff run.

Lashlee is a terrific “copycat shooter” in the growing Veer and Shoot tree whom you can tell has a terrific grasp of the spacing and geometry of the game and how to manipulate space for his best players, whoever they might be. His knack here stood out to me when he was offensive coordinator at SMU for Sonny Dykes and also at Miami. Now back at SMU he’s really putting it all together.

Defensively the Mustangs have been good at developing 3-star locals in the secondary and have tried to build up the D-line by snatching up everyone else’s big guys with any promise who can be lured in via the transfer portal.

I’m not sure if they’ll ever break out with the latter strategy, but let’s see how things look for the Mustangs in year four under Rhett.