On a cool afternoon on the SMU campus, the school gathered alumni and supporters to honor the "Pony Express," the tandem of Eric Dickerson and Craig James whose thunderous runs and national profile helped put Southern Methodist University at the center of college football in the early 1980s. The ceremony — part commemoration, part reckoning — acknowledged on-field brilliance while refusing to paper over the off-field controversies that ultimately reshaped the program and linger in college athletics policy debates.

"The Pony Express remains a defining chapter in SMU athletics," the university said in a statement accompanying the tribute, which included archival images of a 1982 billboard that once boasted of the team's exploits. Dickerson, a future Pro Football Hall of Famer, and James, a standout who also reached the NFL, were celebrated not only for statistics but for the way their play electrified a city and amplified SMU's national brand.

Yet the celebration was tempered by history. SMU was declared a repeat violator by the NCAA and, in 1987, received the only cancellation of a major college football program season — the so-called "death penalty" — over a pay-for-play scandal that stretched across the era and involved boosters, recruits and illicit payments. The punishment decimated recruiting, revenue and decades of momentum, a cautionary tale in the sport's annals.

Had the Pony Express been playing in today's landscape, many dynamics would be different. The emergence of name-image-likeness (NIL) rights has created legal pathways for players to monetize their fame, a structural departure from the secretive pay-for-play arrangements that provoked SMU's sanctions. The transfer portal and expanded agency for players would have offered mobility that was nearly impossible then. Television rights and conference realignment have also soaked the sport in billions, making the stakes of both compliance and sanctions far higher for institutions and communities.

Those shifts do not erase the underlying inequities that framed the Pony Express era, critics say. "The basic power imbalance — wealthy boosters and institutions profiting while players had little control — is still the throughline," said a longtime college sports analyst. The difference now is that legal and market mechanisms partially redistribute value to athletes, but unevenly, driven by social-media marketability and program prominence rather than equitable compensation across positions and sports.

For SMU, the aftermath of the 1987 penalty provides a grim business lesson. The program's decline set back alumni engagement, media visibility and revenue growth for decades; rebuilding athletic brands after severe sanctions is costly and uncertain. Honoring Dickerson and James is therefore as much about reclaiming lost civic pride as it is about acknowledging mistakes that reverberate beyond wins and losses.

The ceremony underscored a broader cultural reckoning: how to remember athletic excellence while confronting the systems that exploited it. As college football hurtles into a more commercial, player-empowered era, the Pony Express remains both a symbol of gridiron artistry and a reminder that institutional accountability, fair compensation and historical memory must travel together.