30 for 30: Pony Excess.

The film Pony Excess delved into the unfortunate past of the SMU Mustangs football team. In this gripping, multi-sourced documentary directors shine light on how SMU boosters and coaches colluded to form the consummate college football team. Through the acts of mere perfect cheating, SMU succeeded in bribing top high school recruits to narrow college options only to SMU. Once one ex-Mustang spilled the gruesome details of SMU’s “secret plan,” NCAA officials introduced the most extreme penalty to college football, the Death Penalty. This source provides an eye-catching timeline of the rise and fall of the Mustangs football program. With the use of interviews of former players, coaches, and boosters, viewers become learned of the snide deals made with recruits, which may have been shadowed through the decades.
The Pony Excess manifests the topic of excessive boosting and how in football history, it can be the demolishment of a team. This becomes useful in the topic of SMU and the Death Penalty through the detailed interviews and research that scrutinize what really caused the SMU death penalty. This film gives a very straightforward approach to the SMU football scandal and elicits the true story. Although SMU was guilty for the entire scheme, this film does take a very objective and unsympathetic view of the scandal possibly exaggerating the intent behind all decisions made during the process. In the scheme of 1980’s SMU football and the death penalty, the Pony Excess is possibly the most detailed and useful source for anything regarding the death penalty and SMU.

The documentary talks with former players such as Eric Dickerson and Craig James, part of the famed “Pony Express” offense that ran circles around the competition, former coach Ron Meyer who helped to lead the SMU program to prominence, writers such as Skip Bayless who covered the SMU program and saw its huge fall, and Dallas sports anchor Dale Hansen who conducted the fatal interviews that led to the Death Penalty.
Matula uses former “Dallas” series star Patrick Duffy to narrate and hold together the documentary, but the film is carried by the numerous interviews with the people who lived through the time. Eric Dickerson and Craig James are used extensively. We also hear from reporters from the Dallas Morning News and the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, the two newspapers which underwent a war to attract readers by covering the SMU story from beginning to end.

The period from 1982 until 1985 is when the boosters gained more control of the program as coach Bobby Collins came into lead the program. It was here where word started leaking out about illegal payments. While SMU was on NCAA probation in 1985, a smoking gun came out about an illegal payment to a player. The player was interviewed on Dallas TV. This led to some of the more uncomfortable footage as an SMU official tries to deny the payment while his initials were seen on an envelope.
It’s moments like these that make this 30 for 30 documentary powerful. Instead of describing a moment or recreating it, Matula has obtained the footage that allows the viewer to see for him/herself what happened. He also uses fast cuts to intersperse news reports and newspaper headlines from the period to reinforce the interviews.

ESPN gives us a very good story to end the 30 for 30 series. Pony Excess is a story that provides lessons about how not to run a football program and how the NCAA might have overstepped its bounds by handing down the Death Penalty.