DALLAS — A giddy Eric Dickerson visited the SMU locker room after the Mustangs made their Atlantic Coast Conference football debut with a thumping of reigning league champion Florida State.
Never mind that the Seminoles are in a shocking free fall since getting left out of the last four-team edition of the College Football Playoff with a 13-0 record last December.
The star running back from the program’s Pony Express heyday in the 1980s wasn’t going to let circumstances change the significance of last Saturday’s 42-16 rout, a victory that only fueled the crazy thought of SMU contending in its return to one of the Football Bowl Subdivision’s most powerful leagues after winning the American Athletic Conference title last year.
“He talked about we’ve been waiting for this for 30 years, this is how we used to play, and you made us proud,” coach Rhett Lashlee said of the speech by Dickerson, a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “It’s hard to put into words in a short answer of all the things that this means to just the SMU family and everyone who’s connected to the university, past, present or will be.”
The Mustangs, who are 4-1 overall this season, are the leaders among the three ACC newcomers — just a couple of weeks after social media was having fun with the idea of California and Stanford meeting in the league title game after their exit from the now-splintered Pac-12, known as the “Conference of Champions” in its glory years.