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The Southern Methodist University football scandal (also known as Ponygate) was an incident in which the football program at Southern Methodist University was investigated and punished for massive violations of NCAA rules and regulations. The most serious violation was the maintenance of a slush fund used for "under the table" payments to players from the mid-1970s through 1986. This culminated in the NCAA handing down the so-called "death penalty" by canceling SMU's entire 1987 schedule. SMU was allowed to return for an abbreviated 1988 season, but opted to sit that season out as well after school officials determined it would be impossible to field a viable team. The severity of the penalty left the SMU football program in ruin. The Mustangs had only one winning season over the next 20 years and failed to make another bowl game until 2009. To date, it is one of the most severe penalties ever imposed on a Division I program, and the only time the NCAA has canceled a football-playing school's entire season at any level. ==Background== The SMU Mustangs had won the 1935 national championship (as determined by the Dickinson System), 10 Southwest Conference titles, and had attended 11 bowl games. They also had numerous All-Americans including a Heisman Trophy winner (Doak Walker in 1949). From 1980 to 1984, SMU enjoyed its most successful era since the late 1940s and early 1950s. They posted a record of 49-9-1 and won three Southwest Conference titles. They nearly won their second national title in 1982, when they finished the season as the only undefeated team in the nation. However, the team lost its shot at a title when it settled for a tie against Arkansas in the last game of the season in order to lock up the conference title and a spot in the Cotton Bowl, rather than risk a two-point conversion that could have won the contest. For most of the first half of the 1980s, the Mustangs played at Texas Stadium, then the home of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys. SMU was the second-smallest school in the Southwest Conference (only Rice was smaller) and one of the smallest in Division I-A, with a total enrollment of just over 9,000 students in 1986. From the 1950s onward, SMU found it difficult to compete against schools that were double (or more) its size. Prior to the 1980s, SMU had tallied only nine winning seasons since 1949. The effort to keep up with the bigger Southwest Conference schools resulted in SMU straying very close to the ethical line and in many cases going over it. While SMU was not the only SWC school to be sanctioned for recruiting violations— in fact, at one point five of the conference's nine member schools were on some form of probation— SMU's violations seemed to be the most egregious. According to the 2010 ESPN documentary film "Pony Excess", many of these violations took place with the full knowledge of school administrators.〔 As a result of their attempts to compete with the larger schools in the SWC, SMU's football program was under nearly constant scrutiny from the NCAA from 1974 onward. SMU was placed on probation five times between 1974 and 1985, and had been slapped with probation seven times overall—more than any other school. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Southern Methodist University football scandal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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