Mustangs

September 1935: SMU beat Texas Christian in a game later dubbed the "Game of the Century," with the Mustangs holding on 20-14 on a night that helped carry them to a claimed national championship. That season is the one longtime followers still bring up first, and it sits alongside two more claimed titles, from 1981 and 1982, in the program's own reckoning of national honours.

The team traces back to 1915, four years after Southern Methodist University itself opened in University Park, in the Dallas area. For decades it played in the Southwest Conference, where it won eleven titles between 1923 and 1984, before conference realignment moved it through the American Athletic Conference — champions there in 2023 — and now the Atlantic Coast Conference. Home games are played at Gerald J. Ford Stadium, which holds 33,200.

Red and blue have been the colours throughout, and the nickname Mustangs has long run alongside an older one, the Pony Express, a phrase pulled from the mail route that once crossed this part of Texas and stuck to the team the way old nicknames do.

No name is tied to the program more firmly than Doak Walker's. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1948, playing in an era when SMU's backfield made the Mustangs a name outside Texas as well as in it, and the stadium plaza and the school's retired jerseys still carry his shadow more than seventy years on.