The Death Penalty was almost 30 years ago. You can make the case that SMU has yet to fully recover from those sanctions.
When you say SMU Mustangs, there is only one thing that comes to mind. The Death Penalty destroyed the football program and is still showing effects nearly 30 years later.
"It’s like what happened after we dropped the [atom] bomb in World War II. The results were so catastrophic that now we’ll do anything to avoid dropping another one." -John Lombardi, former president of the University of Florida.
Even though that one punishment will always go hand in hand with them, SMU is much more of a football program than the single death penalty case.