From the Huntsville Times
<a href="http://www.al.com" target="_blank">www.al.com</a>

Southwest's demise unlike SEC's ongoing football saga

05/26/02

A telling epigram was making the rounds in Texas and Arkansas in the late 1980s: ''If you can't say anything bad about somebody in the Southwest Conference, don't say anything at all.''

Much the same sort of poisoned atmosphere now seems to pervade the Southeastern Conference, once considered a model of prosperity, stability and relative harmony.


Try Our Classifieds



Alabama and Kentucky are currently on NCAA probation. An investigation at Arkansas is winding down. LSU and Tennessee are under su****ion. Rumors abound about others. Seven SEC schools have been penalized for football violations in the last dozen years.

''We're going to do better in the future in these areas,'' predicts outgoing SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, who will preside over his final conference spring meetings this week in Destin, Fla.

Despite the current perception, Kramer insists the SEC's highly publicized compliance problems aren't nearly as serious as 10 or 15 years ago.

''Our institutions have stepped forward and made some tough decisions in those situations,'' he says. ''Some people are going to criticize. That's only natural. But I feel very good about the foundation we've laid for the future in this conference, thanks to the commitment of our presidents.''

Kramer scoffs at the notion that the SEC could be headed in the same direction as the old Southwest Conference, which broke up in the mid-1990s following several years of rancorous in-fighting and back-stabbing in the wake of SMU's ''death penalty'' in 1987.

Besides, the SMU case and the fact that everybody in the league started squealing on everybody else isn't what led to the demise of the Southwest Conference, Kramer says. He points to marketing and financial issues, especially after Arkansas pulled out of the SWC and joined the SEC in 1992.

That's when the eight remaining Southwest Conference schools, all in Texas, began trying to negotiate their own television contracts and searching for other ways to stay afloat. Finally in 1995, four of the league's biggest names - Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor - joined the Big Eight to form the Big 12. The four survivors were left to fend for themselves. Rice, TCU and SMU eventually went to the Western Athletic Conference. Houston (and later TCU) landed in Conference USA.

The Southwest Conference was dead and gone.

Some argue the SEC is traveling down the same perilous road of self-destruction.

Nonsense, says Jim McCullough, a former Gulf South Conference commissioner who now works for the SEC in the areas of eligibility, financial aid and NCAA rule interpretations.

''People who try to compare what's happening in the SEC right now with what happened in the old Southwest Conference don't know what they're talking about,'' McCullough said over the weekend at the SEC baseball tournament in Birmingham. ''The breakup of the Southwest Conference didn't have anything to do with the NCAA. It had everything to do with staying alive financially.''

Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles couldn't agree Former SWC coaches, ADs see no comparison to SEC's troubles Pruett Continued from page B1 more.

''Some people say the Southwest Conference started breaking up when we left,'' said Broyles, who led the Razorbacks into the SEC camp, along with South Carolina, a decade ago. ''But believe me, I know. The Southwest Conference was destined to break up long before Arkansas came to the SEC. Our leaving had nothing to do with it.''

Broyles said there were several major factors. Everybody was recruiting the same athletes, mostly in one state - Texas. Professional sports overtook and passed the colleges on the sports pages and on TV. Attendance slipped to 50 percent occupancy in football and 40 percent in basketball.

Broyles' football coach at the time was Lou Holtz, now at South Carolina. Holtz recently said, ''there are one or two schools (in the SEC) with some strange things happening,'' but added: ''It's not like when I was in the Southwest Conference. With SMU and a few other schools - that was flagrant.''

''Yes, there were some problems with boosters,'' Broyles acknowledged. ''That has happened just about everywhere, and it's a hard thing to control sometimes. But in the end, the ''SMU said, 'If we're going down, so are the others, and they started blowing the whistle on everybody else.' We got hit, Texas Tech got hit, TCU got hit, Texas got hit some, A&M got hit. It was a tough time.'' Rudy Davalos, former Houston athletic director breakup of the Southwest Conference was strictly a financial question - 100 percent financial.''

Festering problem

Well, maybe not 100 percent. Not according to former Baylor coach Grant Teaff, now the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. Teaff was at Baylor from 1972-92. He saw it all.

''I really don't know how long the situation in the SEC has been brewing,'' Teaff said from his office in Waco. ''But I do know the Southwest Conference problem festered over quite a length of time. I was right in the heart of that.

"We knew for several years that things weren't right. If you were recruiting in our league and trying to bring in good players, you had to have your head in a tub to not know that. A lot of bad blood developed among the coaches over the years.''

It all came to a head on Feb. 25, 1987, when the NCAA Committee on Infractions, exasperated by SMU's fifth appearance before the committee in 12 years, shut down the football program for the '87 season. Among the other penalties: SMU was permitted to play only seven games, all on the road, in '88. The school was not allowed to give scholarships for 1987-88 and permitted a maximum of only 15 grants for 1988-89. Nine boosters were disassociated. By then, of course, athletic director Bob Hitch and football coach Bobby Collins were long gone.

''When SMU got the death penalty, the retaliation started,'' said New Mexico athletic director Rudy Davalos, who was Houston's athletic director at the time. ''In a way, you couldn't blame them because of all the cheating going on. SMU said, 'If we're going down, so are the others, and they started blowing the whistle on everybody else.'

''We got hit, Texas Tech got hit, TCU got hit, Texas got hit some, A&M got hit. It was a tough time.''

''When SMU bit the dust, it was boom, boom, boom,'' Teaff said. ''If you had any mustard outside the sandwich, it was going to be found. It was all people were talking about.

"I remember when the SMU stuff was coming out, before the penalties. (Baylor) had gone to play Southern Cal in the Coliseum, and they're No. 2 in the nation at the time. We beat 'em and nobody ever knew it because that was the weekend everything first started coming out about SMU.''

Baylor, Rice and Arkansas escaped, but everybody else in the Southwest Conference had to face NCAA justice in a wrenching six-year stretch from 1986-91 - first TCU, then SMU, then Texas Tech, Texas, Houston and Texas A&M (twice).

''When so many of our schools started getting penalized and players started going out of state, the conference got more and more out of balance,'' Teaff said. ''It was especially hard on the private schools. Finally we went to a rule where the home team kept what was made at home, but there was still a disparity in the money.

''We were never the same after the snowball started rolling down the hill, and ultimately it buried us. It was a sad thing to see because the Southwest Conference was a historic conference, a once-great conference.''

But out of all the troubles came at least one positive result. ''It virtually eliminated alumni and other boosters in the recruiting process,'' Teaff said.

For his part, Davalos believes Arkansas would never have left and the Southwest Conference would still be together had Texas still been dominating the league in football as it did in the heyday of Darrell Royal.

''Arkansas got it going by leaving for the SEC,'' Davalos said, ''but I personally think the league would've survived if Texas had been filling up Memorial Stadium and going to the Cotton Bowl every year as they'd done in the past. Why? Because strong Texas teams would've helped fill up all our stadiums. But during the time I was at Houston, we beat Texas four of six. A&M was beating them pretty much every year. And some others, too.''

Different situation

Broyles, Teaff and Davalos agree with Kramer on one thing: What happened a decade ago in the SWC isn't going to happen in the SEC.

''There are no valid comparisons whatsoever in the two situations,'' Broyles said. ''The SEC's solid. The Southwest Conference wasn't.''

''During the seven years I worked at Auburn, there were always conversations that people in the SEC got into bidding wars,'' said Davalos, who was an assistant basketball coach at Auburn in the 1960s. ''There was always a feeling that some schools weren't beyond offering extra benefits.

''I've been away for a long time and I don't know much about the SEC now. But I certainly don't think they're in any danger of going away.''

Teaff regularly deals with SEC football coaches. Despite all the recent bad publicity, he says he hasn't detected the same sort of seething animosity that he used to see in the SWC.

''If you go into the meetings and everybody's glaring at one another across the table, that's one thing,'' Teaff said. ''But from what I hear, that's not the case with the SEC coaches.

''I know there's a lot of furor right now. I read the papers, too. But you've got to stay away from the Chicken Little syndrome. The sky's not always falling. What seems to be leading to catastrophe isn't that at all.

''I don't get the sense that doom is pending for the SEC,'' Teaff said. ''Very frankly, I think the model the Southwest Conference laid out in the '80s serves as a warning for everybody today.''