“Pony Excess,†ESPN Films’ newest addition to its “30 for 30†documentary series, is as much about the corruption in the football program of Southern Methodist University in ‘70s and ‘80s as it is the story of the political scene in Dallas in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Both are topics that, alone, could warrant their own respective documentaries, but director Thaddeus D. Matula, does a great job of intertwining the two and ultimately creates a film that is informative, entertaining and full of emotion.
Naturally, as an ESPN documentary, the film is chock full of highlight footage of Craig James and Eric Dickerson, who were the two players that fueled the rise of the SMU Mustangs in the first place. Seeing these two amazing running backs dismantle offensive lines with their strength and skill alone is a great reason to check out this documentary. The fact that they are both great interviews and shed an enormous amount of light on the way they were recruited help fuel the documentary as well.
The way that they ended up at SMU wasn’t unusual for the time, since according to the documentary, every school in the state was bribing high school students to come to their university and play football. However, the fact that Dickerson and James are still mum about the specifics shows how deep the story of corruption goes.
Once the film breaks away from these two and focuses on the recruiting tendencies of SMU head coach Ron Meyer, things get even more entertaining. Just like Dickerson and James, Meyer is extremely charismatic. Success was something that was paid for back then and since every team was cheating, nothing was out of the question. Behind Meyer’s tactics, powerful boosters and eventually successful politicians, SMU was the best team in college football.
But like all situations such as this, the team was caught at its own game. Eventually sentenced to “death†by the NCAA in 1987, SMU was to have no program for a year and had a bevy of restrictions placed on it to make sure the team had to start from scratch. To this day, this is the first and only time the NCAA has handed down this penalty and it took more than 20 years for the team to work its way back to respectability.
This is where the story truly begins.
Watching that rise, fall and eventual rise again, with a plethora of old footage, combined with excellent interviews and opinions from newspaper reporters who covered the team and members of the team themselves and their families, “Pony Excess†has the type of brevity to support its ideas and convince you that the college was made an example of.
In the end, SMU essentially paid for all the success the entire state of Texas had in college football in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. The politicians kept a blind eye to it, but were eventually shown to be as equal a part of it as anyone else, telling the type of story that doesn’t come around very often. The way Matula brings all of this to light, through solid research, in-depth interviews and a host of old footage makes this a documentary that does more than do the ESPN name proud.
It captures the emotion of a program that rose from the ashes not once, but twice and continues to ask itself for more.
I’ve spent some time to try and find out how much Eric Dickerson got paid to sign with SMU. I can’t even an estimate of the amount. Does anyone know how much he was actually paid?