SMU is having fun again three decades after rebirth

HDALLAS ere comes question No. 3, this one from “Anonymous,” in the “Ask the Coach” segment of the coach's radio show on a Monday night in an airy meeting room at a sprawling bar. SMU radio voice Rich Phillips reads it, and it's precisely the kind of question the human subspecies known as football coach will not and should not answer, suggesting the inquirer even might have dabbled in puckishness.

Which game will be the hardest on the remainder of the schedule?

With swift and keen detective skills, the welltraveled, 49-year-old, second-year SMU coach, Sonny Dykes, considers the question and surveys a room holding about 120 people with a recommended capacity on the wall of 166 and manages to decipher and identify “Anonymous:” his 11-year-old daughter, Ally.

“I know your sentence structure,” Dykes deadpans, and the room has a great big guffaw.

It's a fitting scene from a fresh phenomenon the nation would not recognize: giddy SMU.

The nation once saw highbrow SMU (49-9-1 from 1980 to 1984), Eric Dickerson SMU and then dead SMU, reborn SMU, forgotten SMU, moribund SMU and pretty good SMU starting late last decade under June Jones. The nation has seen — or, really, not seen — an SMU with a 116-235 record and no more than eight wins in any season since 1989, the year SMU hobbled out of the NCAA crypt that provided infamy in a sport long rich in mischief.

Now here's an SMU standing 6-0, with a cherished win at TCU, with a 43-37 win over Tulsa on Oct. 5 wrung from a 30-9 deficit after three quarters, with a ranking of No. 19 and with a bout Saturday against Temple.

It's an SMU giddy enough to delight even an erstwhile scarecrow.

“Oh, it's just so much fun,” said erstwhile scarecrow Paul Layne, who has attended the past 514 SMU games home and away and very away (Tokyo, Hawaii) and who looks so much younger than his 65 that you wonder whether attending 514 SMU games in a row is some sort of elixir.

“It's great to be a Mustang,” he continued. “One thing, I didn't know if I'd ever live long enough to see it.”

Layne, a former student reporter at SMU who found it too excruciating to refrain from cheering in the press box and thus became an SMU cheerleader, also didn't know whether he would get anywhere near 514 when, in October 1995, he got one of those unusual diagnoses of chickenpox at age 41 just as SMU fixed to play Rice in the Cotton Bowl. So Layne had to ply some creativity.

While Rice defeated SMU, 34-24, and dropped SMU to 1-7 along the trail to 1-10, one of the world's all-time fans watched alone, from the barren rafters of the Cotton Bowl, while dressed as a scarecrow, the costume providing further help against prospective contagion.

Clearly, he has earned his turn at giddy SMU.

At giddy SMU, a Dallasraised wide receiver with a movie-star smile meets with reporters. James Proche calls the Tulsa fracas “my favorite game of all time,” and he ranks 22nd in the country in receiving yards per game (88.2), 11th in touchdown catches (seven) and eighth in receptions (45), coming off a junior year in which he caught a tall 93.

“It's amazing,” Proche says. “I'm a Dallas kid through and through, born and raised in DeSoto, played Little League here, and to be able to see this group being able to represent this city and bring SMU back to promise, that's something that I focused on, and it's real.

“I don't understand why somebody would go represent somewhere else instead of building a giant, you know, where they are. You understand?”

He finishes, whereupon, at giddy SMU, he gives high handshakes and shoulder-bump hugs to all six reporters in sequence.

At giddy SMU, they're just off a crackerjack of a game in which they converted six consecutive fourth downs, of which Dykes says, “There's some teams that won't convert six fourth downs all year.”

And at giddy SMU, a coach from the Hal Mumme-Mike Leach fold who has seen a whole lot of most everything by now and who has assistant-coached at J.J. Pearce High (in Texas), at Navarro Junior College (in Texas), at Kentucky, at Northeast Louisiana, at Texas Tech, at Arizona, then head-coached at Louisiana Tech, Jared Goff's California and SMU (with former Texas quarterback Shane Buechele in command now), can even kid around about, you know, that Tulsa kickoff.

That Tulsa kickoff caromed around the country's phone screens after it caromed around the sideline with SMU players unable to corral it until a Tulsa player fell on it in the end zone for a Tulsa touchdown. It looked like one of those nightmares when you cannot pick up a ball or run to first base without stumbling.

When Phillips brought it up, Dykes said, “Well ... hmmm,” and the audience laughed the way audiences can when its team is 6-0.

“A great learning experience for us,” he wound up saying.

At giddy SMU, then, Dykes and staff suddenly face what some coaches, Georgia's Kirby Smart among them, have called the hardest of all their coaching tasks: keeping young men consistent amid the onus of widespread praise. He speaks of “the need for people to feel validated” and says: “So many of them are accustomed to getting it from social media and from people they don't even know, which I've really always kind of struggled to understand a little bit, why it could be so important to so many young people, to get validation from people that they don't know. But I think it is, and I think that's part of, kind of, the society that we live in, to an extent.

“And so, you know, when guys start getting a lot of praise, you've got to do a good job of making sure they understand how quickly it can go away. You know what I mean? I think we're one of those programs that, if we lose a game, then our shine's going to go off pretty quickly, and I think our guys understand that. It's certainly been pointed out to them enough, to where we know we have to fight for every ounce of respect that we get. We're OK with that.”

In that vein and others, his players seem to know his sentence structure.