DALLAS — The Loyd All-Sports Center bottom floor is almost unrecognizable for those that walked it during the Chad Morris era. Gone are the slogans, team awards, history of SMU mural and the locker room and team areas are torn apart due to construction.

The man heading up the renovations, senior associate director of football operations & creative media Anthony Crespino, looks it over as a million things race through his mind. There's tile going up in the coaches and team locker room. The floor is sticky awaiting new carpet and flooring in each room. The players lounge is getting touched up. The team meeting rooms are getting new chairs and touch screen TVs, bringing the program to the 21st century as projectors get thrown out.

Walls where SMU history, award winners and more are mostly white waiting for new decorations. The bottom floor will be all about current players, he says. The first and second floor can be adorned with SMU history, draft picks and more.

Like the staff's social media efforts, Sonny Dykes wants everything to be about SMU Football.

"The biggest thing is just to make this about SMU football, it’s not about anything else, it’s just about SMU football just from a brand standpoint," Crespino told Pony Stampede. "Coach doesn’t have a whole lot of slogans or anything. It’s just “Pony Up Dallas” and “SMU Football” and that’s it and that’s what it should be about because it was here before us and it will be here after us, so just playing that and sending home that message."

Dykes made his first appearance in a video just last week. Crespino joked that the first-year coach is hard to track down for video crews.

"I think he has a camera awareness because as we get to him, he somehow ends up moving and I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but I like to give him the business about it," Crespino said.

It's a workman like attitude around the program and they want their social media channels to showcase that. SMU hired Lauren Damone as director of branding and social media to assist with those efforts. It's about quality, not quantity of content, Crespino said.

"Just from a brand standpoint I don’t think we need to do crazy stuff, but things that resonates with recruits," Crespino said. "I think the previous staff did a really good job with that and we’re going to continue to build on that, but kind of do it in our way."

When spring practice ends, SMU's staff will be able to sit down to hash out more details for its approach to social media. In the first month, it was about getting content out, now it's focusing on consistency, the SMU brand and other priorities.

"I think now we’re to the point, once we get through spring ball to where we can actually sit down and establish a brand standard where our designs are consistent, our colors are consistent, our blues and reds are consistent on all of our apparel, we’ve got a similar logo just making stuff consistent," Crespino said. "Really sitting down and figuring out the best way to market SMU football with the city and academics and I think there are some things you can do there to really tie this in."

The SMU basketball team has prioritized "SMU" across its chest for jerseys, something that Crespino likes from an identity standpoint, but also keeping things cool for recruiting.

"From a brand identity standpoint we want everyone — even if you didn’t know who SMU was — we want everyone to know ‘Oh hey that’s SMU playing,’" Crespino said. "I think basketball has done a good job with their jersey it just has a big block SMU across the chest, like there is no confusion as to who is playing, so we’re kind of working towards to that goal while still keeping something recruits will like what we’re doing."

From the academics of SMU, to being in Dallas, to working with Dallas companies, that's what #PonyUpDallas is about. The hashtag took over as soon as Dykes was hired at SMU.

"Like #PonyUpDallas is more of a lifestyle. It doesn’t want to sound like a motto. We’re going to use Dallas companies for screen printing and buying t-shirts and services," Crespino said. "We’re going to get behind the Mavericks and we hope they get behind us. That’s kind of the idea is we are Dallas’ team. We’ve been implementing the Dallas logo ,the “triple hashtag, tripled” we’re going to put that on a lot stuff going forward.

"Really this is Dallas’ team so we want people to come out and be at games and whatever way we can connect with them, we connect with everyone differently you know so finding other ways to make them tick and communicating that with them."

Expect a summer concert series, new ways to engage young alumni, and more to come from the staff as things settle down. It'll all be done in a genuine and real way while keeping Dallas and SMU at the forefront.

Until then, the graphics for the team room are coming in. Cabinets are being ripped out and replaced with modern looking decor. The weight room is being reconfigured to best suit the team.

There's work to be done for the staff. They're prioritizing quality over quantity while they go about it.

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