Payroll to Meet

Southern Methodist University in Dallas is one of numerous prestigious universities in Texas. The school’s football team was the pride of the university and the city. Before the late 1970s, however, the relatively small school had trouble recruiting and struggled to keep up with the big-time football universities that were often more than double its size. Under pressure to compete, the SMU football program engaged in ethics, rules, and recruiting violations for years. When the corruption came to light, the NCAA handed out its most serious punishment in the history of college sports—the “death penalty”—which cancelled the team’s entire 1987 schedule.In A Payroll to Meet, author David Whitford details the Mustangs’ descent into corruption and the fallout when it was discovered. Most egregiously, the football program ran a huge slush fund that was used to pay players from the mid-1970s through 1986. Bill Clements, chairman of the SMU board and soon to be reelected governor of Texas, knew all about the slush fund before the NCAA did. He opted, however, to phase out the payments rather than stop them immediately, for fear that angry players might go public and create still more problems for SMU. Clements and the athletic director Bob Hitch decided that the football program had “a payroll to meet.” 

“[Whitford’s] well-documented exposé is impressive.”—Publishers Weekly  , “Exhibiting admirable sympathy for innocent fans and boosters . . . [Whitford] makes engrossing, even suspenseful the story of recruiting violations and cover-ups that led to the 1987 termination of Southern Methodist University’s football program by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Combining the histories of Dallas, college football, SMU (chartered in 1911), and the NCAA, Whitford explains how athletics became attached to institutions of higher learning--from the 1830s, when English sports entered the curriculum, to present-day America, where sports coaches often earn higher salaries than college presidents.”—Library Journal , “David Whitford does a fine job of detailing a decade of sordid events leading to SMU’s banishment from football.”—F. E. Halpert, The Nation, “[Mr. Whitford] has put the entire narrative [of the SMU scandal] together so that it reads a bit like an athletic version of Jimmy Breslin’s novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”—New York Times Book Review, “Should be required reading for every college president.”—Frederick C. Klein, Wall Street Journal  

David Whitford is an editor at large for Fortune magazine and a regular commentator on sports, business, and politics for television. He is the author of Extra Innings: A Season in the Senior League and Playing Hardball: The High-Stakes Battle for Baseball’s New Franchises.