DALLAS -- For 40 years, SMU has made Sonny Dykes feel at home.
Sonny's dad, Spike, was a legend in Texas coaching circles. He spent 37 of his 40 years in the profession coaching high school or college in the state. But when Spike took a job at New Mexico (and then Mississippi State), 8-year-old Sonny needed a Texas team to keep him anchored to his roots. He quickly chose SMU.
So a few years later, in 1982, Spike pulled some strings. He got Sonny a field pass to the SMU-Texas Tech game for his 13th birthday. He watched from the Mustangs' sideline as receiver Bobby Leach became known as the "Miracle Man," catching a lateral on a bounce and running it back 91 yards with 4 seconds left for the winning score in a 34-27 win over the Red Raiders to preserve a 13-game winning streak.
"I just kind of grew up an SMU guy," Sonny Dykes said, rattling off his appreciation for the vaunted "Pony Express" teams with the two superstar running backs and the option quarterback he emulated in his front yard. "I loved Eric Dickerson. I loved Craig James. [Quarterback] Lance McIlhenny was my favorite player."
Those early '80s teams won at least 10 games in four straight seasons and finished in the AP top 10 three times, catapulting the Mustangs to the top of the Southwest Conference and capturing the attention of the nation -- and the NCAA. Before the 1987 season, SMU was given the only "death penalty" in major college football history, shutting down the program for repeated recruiting violations, including a payroll for star players and the use of new cars. (Dickerson's Trans Am drew the majority of the attention, but the Datsun 280ZX was a favorite of the players, according to McIlhenny.)
Dykes, now in his second season as SMU's head coach, is the architect of a comeback story that rivals any in the school's history. The upstart Mustangs are 7-0 for the first time since that 1982 season and are ranked No. 16 -- their first time in the Top 25 since the 1987 sanctions -- as they face Houston on Thursday (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN and the ESPN App).
The unblemished start is one of the biggest surprises of this football season. But given the past three decades of futility on the Hilltop, it is downright shocking. According to ESPN Stats & Info research:
Since football returned at SMU in 1989, 104 different schools appeared in the AP poll before the Mustangs made an appearance.
SMU's best start over that span had been 2-0, done just three times: 1996, 2009 and 2017.
Overall, SMU's record in the past 30 years was 114-235-3. That is tied for the sixth-most losses in the FBS over that time, ahead of only New Mexico State, Kent State, UNLV, UTEP and Eastern Michigan.
SMU's return to prominence followed the same path as its prodigal son coach. After four seasons as the head coach at Cal, where he went 19-30 and never seemed to find his footing personally, Dykes was fired. He was determined to return to Texas, spending one year as an analyst for Gary Patterson at TCU, before the perfect opportunity came calling 40 miles across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
He finds wayward players and brings 'em home too. The Dallas area produces hundreds of college football prospects each year. The Mustangs can't get everyone they want. But they are happy to offer a soft landing spot to the ones who want to return.
"I think certain schools fit certain kids, and they're gonna be more successful at those schools because of that," Dykes said. "It's the same thing for coaches. I know this."
There are 60 new faces on this year's roster, including 14 transfers (seven are grad transfers) plus five from junior colleges. They include starting quarterback Shane Buechele, who grew up in nearby Arlington and arrived after losing the starting job at Texas to Sam Ehlinger. He joined wide receiver Reggie Roberson Jr. from another Dallas suburb, Mesquite. Roberson came home the year before from West Virginia to be closer to family. In last week's win over Temple, Buechele threw for 457 yards and six touchdowns. Roberson caught eight of those passes for 250 yards and three touchdowns.
In all, 35 players who previously played at another school are on the roster. They have been responsible for 32.7% of SMU's yards from scrimmage this season, 30.9% of the touchdowns scored, 44.4% of receiving touchdowns and 18.2% of rushing touchdowns.
Dykes said the opening of the transfer portal came along at just the right time as he tried to fill out a roster after the coaching change. After Roberson had a big season with more than 800 receiving yards, Dykes said he was sort of a pied piper for players who knew each other from the summer camp or recruiting circuits.
"All of a sudden, kids in the portal are calling us," Dykes said, adding that at one point the staff was evaluating 45 transfer candidates. "What we had to do was put our roster up and look at our numbers and say, 'OK, look, we can't have 35 seniors one year.' We had to make it all balance. And so if you look at our transfers, we took one one-year transfer. That was [defensive tackle] Zach Abercrumbia, who transferred from Rice, who grew up 2 miles away. And this is a heck of a player. He's probably gonna play in the NFL."
Buechele transferred with two years of eligibility remaining and is thriving. Last weekend, his six touchdowns tied the mark for the most in one game in SMU history.
"We've had some really good quarterbacks," said Dykes, who coached Jared Goff as head coach at Cal and Nick Foles as QB coach/offensive coordinator at Arizona. "He's playing probably as well as any of them have ever played. He's the poster child for what we want. People will dismiss him and say, 'Well, he lost his job at Texas. He can't be that good.' I think the guy's gonna play 15 years in the NFL. I think he'll have a chance to be a starting quarterback in the NFL."
Dykes, who estimates he spent four months of the year in Dallas recruiting when he was a Texas Tech assistant, has made the city the central character of his program. He wants to keep players home in recruiting. He wants high school coaches to hang out and talk ball. He wants area kids to wear the SMU T-shirts they get from his free youth clinics and to see SMU billboards featuring players from their neighborhoods when they walk to school.
"Our No. 1 thing was that we've got to become synonymous with Dallas," Dykes said. "When you think Dallas, Texas, you need to think of SMU. When you think of SMU, you need to think of Dallas."
It doesn't get much more Dallas than Fin Ewing III, a car dealer and longtime official for the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic who shares a last name with the mythical soap opera family that depicted the city's elite -- and did this interview via text message from a crocodile-hunting blind in Africa.
This year, Ewing's bowl is the home of the top Group of 5 team. With Boise State's loss to BYU, there is a scenario where SMU can finish strong and earn a spot in a top-tier bowl game in the middle of its recruiting turf. According to ESPN's Football Power Index, the Mustangs are favorites in every remaining game except for a road trip to Memphis on Nov. 2.
"It would be so awesome to see SMU in the Cotton Bowl, not just because of Sonny, but what a story," Ewing said. "Pull for the Ponies. I think they will only get better."
McIlhenny stuck around Dallas, becoming vice president of a local real estate company after finishing his career as the winningest QB in Southwest Conference history. And now that the Mustangs are rolling again, he's ready to start settling some scores with those schools that left SMU behind.
"Everybody kept talking about TCU. It's just TCU. They're nothing special other than they've had deep pockets for 15 years," he said. "I want to win a bunch of games and play a team like Baylor in whatever setting and put a shellackin' on 'em."
George Strait songs are pumping out of an assistant coach's office. Old Texas rivalries are being discussed. The Cotton Bowl is within reach. It's no wonder Dykes feels at home. He sounds giddy when he talks about the benefits of living in idyllic Highland Park, the neighborhood bordering campus with a median home price of around $1.5 million. He walks to work. He and his wife, Kate, have three kids, two of whom can walk to school. The youngest goes to a child-care program Dykes can see from the Mustangs' practice field. The family gets to attend Friday night football games to watch the Highland Park Scots, one of the all-time great Texas high school teams and one that has produced players such as Doak Walker, Bobby Layne and Matthew Stafford.
And the old option quarterback is hanging around, but now he's watching Dykes work, fascinated by his Air Raid.
"I love going and watching practice. They have such a great system," McIlhenny said. "The lean years were rough, but there's a different buzz around campus. Gradually it's kind of building up steam. The players love their coaches. I don't know if we could've said that a couple of years ago. It's wild that he's here and we're undefeated. It's fun."
Ewing is a TCU grad and an admirer of Gary Patterson, Dykes' counterpart in the schools' annual Iron Skillet rivalry. But he considers Dykes a good friend.
"My first date with my wife was SMU-Pitt in the '83 Cotton Bowl," he says of the game that pitted McIlhenny against Dan Marino. "The Ponies won. Not much has happened since then. It's happening now, though. SMU is so lucky to have him and he loves it there."
Yes, these are Dykes' people, even the Horned Frogs.
"It's as good a situation as anybody can imagine, especially being where I was before," Dykes said. "I'm close to a lot of people I've grown up with my whole life and I've known forever. The biggest thing is just having friends. For whatever reason, it just didn't happen in California."
He'll see one of those friends on Thursday on the opposite sideline, another coach who came back searching for the elusive "fit" that Dykes seems to have found.
"In our six years at Tech together [2000-06], we became really good friends," Houston coach Dana Holgorsen said this week. "I would always go to Houston to recruit, and he would always go to Dallas. SMU's always kind of been one of his jobs he really wanted, much like Houston's always been a job that I wanted. His love affair with the city of Dallas just makes that a really good fit."
Dykes recalls those recruiting visits, how he'd often make a detour to drive around the SMU campus and wonder about the possibilities.
"I always saw a potential program," he said. "I just thought it was a gold mine. I mean, this is home to me. This is home."