SWC’s dying days The final season of the late, great Southwest Conference was 20 years ago Several days a week, Spike Dykes and Tom Rossley share a round of golf at their beloved Horseshoe Bay and swap tales about the dearly departed Southwest Conference. Both were head coaches, Dykes at Texas Tech and Rossley at SMU, when the SWC’s eight remaining schools opened the league’s final football season 20 years ago this week. Dykes, 77, sloshes tobacco juice in the golf cart while amusing Rossley, 69, with anecdotes from the SWC’s better days. Dykes, though, sounds somber when thoughts turn to the league’s demise. “It’s like a good friend dying,” he says. “You hate it and there’s not anything you can do about it, but you darn sure can have great memories.” Formed in 1914, the SWC was Division I college football’s fifth-oldest league. For most of its 81 seasons, it was formidable. It limped and wheezed, however, through its waning years — weakened by some schools’ woeful records and fan apathy; impaired by limited TV exposure and revenue; mortally wounded by scandals and probations. Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes (1993 File Photo/The Associated Press) Death was so inevitable, especially after Arkansas’ 1992 escape to the Southeastern Conference, that the SWC actually planned its 1995-96 athletic-year cremation. That is, if a politically-charged, back-stabbing family feud can be defined as planning. In March of 1994, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor accepted invitations to merge with Big Eight Conference members and form the Big 12, starting in 1996. Discarded SMU, TCU and Rice found refuge with the Western Athletic Conference. Houston latched on to a new league, Conference USA. “I’d been a Southwest Conference person since I arrived in 1953,” says Frank Windegger, who spent 45 years at TCU as student-athlete, baseball coach (1959-75) and athletic director (1975-1997). “That tore me up pretty good when that happened.” The SWC’s final football season began with six nonconference games on Saturday, September 2, 1995 with nostalgia, animosity and awkwardness — feelings that would magnify when conference play commenced four weeks later. Texas A&M carried into the season a record 29 straight conference games without a loss, a No. 3 national ranking and potential to become the SWC’s first unbeaten national champion since Texas in 1969. Not that SWC brethren felt collegial about the Aggies’ prospects. “I don’t see how A&M winning is going to help us,” Houston coach Kim Helton said. “If they win all their games, I could see it being a value to our conference. But since there is no conference, I can’t see A&M’s winning a championship being of any value whatsoever.”


'It was a sad thing' During its first 100 years, college football’s landscape largely was regionalized, but that changed with the advent of cable television and a 1984 lawsuit brought by the universities of Oklahoma and Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA could no longer limit teams’ TV appearances. Charter member Arkansas’ departure left the SWC with an eight-school, one-state league. Its 6.7-percent sliver of the national television market seems absurd by today’s expectations. Fred Jacoby, SWC commissioner from 1982 to 1993, told The News in 1995 that he’d urged expansion in the early ‘90s, adding, “Even though Texas is a big, wonderful state, in the eyes of the nation, it is still parochial.” Also, a league long known for producing legends like Doak Walker, Earl Campbell and Bob Lilly had incurred this permanent stain: From 1985 to 1994, it had seven seasons when at least one school was banned from title consideration due to NCAA sanctions. Most notoriously, SMU had to cancel its 1987 season and also chose not to field a team in 1988. “I hated to see the Southwest Conference end,” says Rossley, SMU’s quarterbacks coach in 1989 and head coach from 1991 through 1996. “And I really couldn’t help but think that the death penalty at SMU was kind of the beginning of the death penalty of the Southwest Conference.” Twenty Septembers ago, coaches, players, media and fans saw a new college football era dawn, but no one could have fathomed a 2015 regular season in which Texas A&M will not play any Texas schools. That’s a first in the Aggie program’s 122-year history. For Lubbock native Dykes, Texas Tech’s defensive coordinator from 1984 to 1986 and head coach from 1986 to 1999, the initial breakup of longstanding state rivalries was really sad. “And I think it’s sad today,” he adds. “One of the great experiences of being able to play football at Texas Tech was to take a trip to College Station. See the Cadets march in. The great tradition. And they don’t get to do it anymore. “Why would you ever ruin that deal?” Dykes, Rossley and R.C. Slocum entered the SWC as assistants in 1972 — Dykes at Texas under Darrell Royal, Rossley at Arkansas under Frank Broyles; Slocum at A&M under Emory Bellard. Rossley also was Rice’s quarterbacks coach from 1978 to 1981 and finished his career as Texas A&M’s quarterbacks coach from 2008 to 2011, most notably tutoring Jerrod Johnson and convincing Mike Sherman to recruit Johnny Manziel. Dykes and Rossley each coached in 19 of the SWC’s 81 seasons. Slocum, 70, topped them with 30 SWC seasons, all at A&M as a head coach and assistant. Coach R.C. Slocum leads the Aggies onto Kyle Field gefore a game during the team's final Southwest Conference season. (1995 File Photo) “I was excited about the Big 12, but being someone who had grown up in Texas and coached in the SWC for a long time, it was a sad thing,” Slocum says of the 1995 season. Slocum, though, saw the breakup coming. The potential fallout alarmed him. He recalls attending the 1993 coaches convention in Orlando and hearing rampant rumors about Texas bolting to the Pac-10. Back in College Station, Slocum met with A&M athletic director John David Crow, president Bill Mobley, regents chairman Ross Margraves and board member Billy Clayton — former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives — to discuss the school’s options.


Slocum told them that if the SWC folded, the best cultural fit for A&M would be the SEC. The administrators authorized Slocum to reach out to SEC commissioner Roy Kramer. “I called Roy and said, ‘This is just an exploratory deal, hypothetical: If the Southwest Conference were to break up, would there be any interest from the SEC in Texas A&M?’ ” Slocum recalls. Kramer replied that he would need to informally poll SEC school presidents. “Within a couple of days, he called back and said, ‘Yeah, there would be strong interest,’ ” Slocum says. Slocum says he considered the SEC as A&M’s fallback until he learned of a meeting in Austin with the presidents of Texas and A&M summoned on short notice. Slocum’s understanding was the meeting was initiated by Texas Governor Ann Richards and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, both Baylor graduates. “In that meeting it was discussed that it looked like the Southwest Conference was going to break up, but that Texas and A&M were not going anywhere without taking Tech and Baylor with them,” Slocum says. “That was the end of our discussions with the SEC and the end of Texas going to the Pac-10. “For a while, anyway.” Recalling the episode more than two decades later, 81-year-old Windegger’s tone drips with disgust. “It wasn’t happy times,” he says. “For those being left out — us being one of them — it was very traumatic. And I still feel it was a very big political deal, without a doubt in my mind. “I think Baylor and Tech lucked out because they had some key people in state positions.” Awkward final season For its final 1995-96 athletic season, the SWC unveiled a commemorative “Celebrating Excellence” logo. Commemorative SWC logo The league’s lame-duck commissioner, 37-year-old Kyle Kallander, was elevated from assistant commissioner on June 7, replacing Steve Hatchell, who had become Big 12 commissioner-in-waiting and set up temporary offices in Dallas. “We didn’t want it to be a dirge,” Kallander says of that final year. “We wanted it to be a celebration of the great history of the Southwest Conference and our institutions. “I thought we were pretty successful in doing that.” In most respects, 1995 was an image improvement from the previous year — when A&M finished 10-0-1 (its only blemish being a tie with 1-9-1 SMU in San Antonio), but was ineligible for the title and bowl consideration due to NCAA sanctions. Instead, Tech, Texas, Baylor, TCU and Rice were declared co-champions with 4-3 conference records, with the Red Raiders advancing to the Cotton Bowl on the “last appearance” rule. They hadn’t been since 1939. Rice hadn’t been since ’57, TCU since ’58. The 1995 season saw Houston’s Chuck Clements lead the league in passing, Tech’s Byron Hanspard of DeSoto lead in rushing and the emergence of freshmen Ricky Williams at Texas and Dat Nguyen at A&M. Still . . . “It was awkward, no doubt about it,” Dykes says. “It was good news, bad news. The bad news is that the conference was dissolving. The good news is we got to go to a different level.” A&M fell at No. 7 Colorado in its third game and two weeks later saw its 29-game SWC unbeaten streak end in Lubbock, 14-7. Yet entering the final regular-season Saturday in SWC football history, Dec. 2, No. 16 A&M hosted No. 9 Texas with a chance to seize the league title. Behind quarterback James Brown and a touchdown by Williams, coach John Mackovic’s Longhorns prevailed, 16-6. Young commissioner Kallander took the title trophy to the Texas locker room. “You are the undisputed conference champions,” he told them, pausing several seconds to jubilant shouts, “and you are the final Southwest Conference champions!” Mackovic beamed. The locker room erupted. That, however, was not the final SWC regular-season game or poignant moment. Rice had lost to Baylor in the first SWC game, on Oct. 15, 1915, so for symmetry the Owls scheduled their 1995 finale against Houston 90 minutes after the Texas-A&M kickoff. The Cougars pulled out an 18-17 victory. Afterward, a fan was escorted to midfield to turn off Rice Stadium’s lights, symbolically closing the curtain on SWC football — though Texas, A&M and Tech went on the Sugar, Alamo and Copper Bowls, respectively. Of course, final SWC seasons in other sports were still to be played, culminating with May’s conference baseball and tennis tournaments and track meet in Lubbock. “We really had a great year,” says Kallander, who for the past 19 years has been commissioner of the North Carolina-based Big South Conference. “But the last three months was a little like overseeing a funeral. You’re meeting with a lot of attorneys, trying to decide what to do with the estate.” Longtime SWC assistant commissioner of media relations Bo Carter recalls helping to pack the 333 boxes of records and memorabilia that were shipped to the Southwest Collection Library in Lubbock. Included were 343 sound recordings, 854 video tapes, 10 reels of microfilm and 538 oversized items, including Carter’s desk. Other items were sent to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco. The rest was sold at auction on June 29, 1996, the day before the SWC offices closed for good. By then, the league’s 10 full-time employees had dwindled by about half. “We were pretty much the last of the Mohicans,” Carter says.

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