DALLAS — A large chunk of Rhett Lashlee’s brief coaching stint at Miami occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, so there was plenty of time spent cooped up in his South Florida house with his wife and two sets of twins.
Like many of us, Lashlee used some of his time in quarantine to better himself. He decided to pick up a new skill and do a little research.
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“I needed to do something, right?” Lashlee laughed. “So I learned how to smoke meat on a Traeger, and I learned the history of The U. I wanted to embrace where we were. I wanted to know the history and the heritage.”
He wanted to understand how Howard Schnellenberger built Miami into a national powerhouse in the early 1980s. How the program remained elite over several coaching regimes. How the Hurricanes assembled one of the greatest rosters in the history of college football in 2001. Why? Because he wanted to draw parallels to what made Miami traditionally great and how he could help rebuild the Hurricanes in modern times.
Through his research, Lashlee learned something that surprised him.
“I looked, and I don’t think any of Miami’s five national championship teams had more than 40 percent of their roster from South Florida or Miami,” Lashlee said. “I think only one of their five national championship quarterbacks is even from the state of Florida. … You look back at it and see they were getting the best kids from South Florida to stay home, but they weren’t recruiting only kids from South Florida.”
Lashlee thought he was doing research that would benefit him during his tenure with the Hurricanes. It turned out much bigger than that.
Now in his second season as SMU’s head coach, he realizes the data he found on Miami’s roster construction can serve as his North Star for how he wants to build the Mustangs.
SMU recently accepted an invitation to join the ACC, ending a decades-long quest to return to a power conference after the collapse of the Southwest Conference in the mid-1990s. Lashlee’s program will soon be playing at the highest level of football, and he’ll be facing that same Miami program that helped him get to this phase in his career.
And, as Lashlee points out, his last two employers have more in common than most might think. Miami is a private school with an undergraduate enrollment of about 12,000. SMU is smaller, but it’s also a private school, in the heart of Dallas with just over 7,000 undergrads.
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“Miami was a private school in a recruiting hotbed in the ’80s,” Lashlee said. “We are trying to bring it back where it was here in the ’80s.”
Can he build SMU into The U of Texas?
That’s the blueprint.
“I had been at SMU before with Sonny (Dykes), but then I went to Miami and learned the history of The U,” Lashlee said. “We had a model for how we wanted to win here with Sonny, and I agreed with that, which is why we’re still doing much of it that way now. But when I came back from Miami, I had learned a lot about a different but similar model that worked there. When I came back, I was like, ‘Man, that could work.'”
Let’s break it down.
The Sonny Dykes model for SMU was to own Dallas. There was no reason for SMU to spend time outside of its own city because there is so much talent at home. Dykes wanted every prospect in the area to feel a connection to SMU. The Mustangs spent a ton of money on billboards and placed them in strategic spots around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Each billboard featured a player on SMU’s roster from that area. SMU also introduced the very popular “Triple D” logo and has alternate uniforms with Dallas in script across the front.
That plan worked. SMU’s starting quarterback, Preston Stone, is the highest-rated player to sign with the program in the modern recruiting era. He was a top-150 player in the 247Sports Composite with offers from Power 5 programs all over the country, but he opted to stay home. Lashlee was an assistant on Dykes’ staff at the time and had a front-row seat to watch how Dykes implemented his plan. The branding, the recruiting emphasis, all of it played a role in steadily increasing the talent level on the Mustangs roster.
A lot has changed for SMU since Lashlee took over after the 2021 season. The move to the ACC, simply put, is program-changing. And while the school agreed to forgo nine years of television revenue from the conference, money will not be an issue as it transitions to its new league. In September, SMU announced it raised more than $100 million in a seven-day period, and boosters have indicated they plan to contribute more than $200 million in total to help offset the lost television revenue.
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“We don’t want to wait 10 years to compete,” Lashlee said. “We want to compete now.”
How does that impact SMU’s recruiting plan and how does it relate to what Miami did so well in the past?
Lashlee will be the first to admit there is a temptation to add new territories to SMU’s recruiting strategy. Now with a Power 5 budget — and all of that booster money — the Mustangs could go into South Carolina, Florida or anywhere else on the East Coast. There’s a lot to like about SMU, and now it has the means and the conference to attract a higher-caliber prospect. SMU could lose sight of Dykes’ plan all together, try too many new things and spread itself too thin.
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“It is tempting to muddy the waters of the recruiting strategy, but we just can’t allow it to,” Lashlee said. “So going back to Miami, we were focused on getting the best players — not all of them, but the best — out of the Tri-County Area in South Florida (Broward, Dade and Palm Beach). For the past 20 years, the best players in South Florida were going to Alabama, Georgia and Clemson, and the second-tier players were staying home, which is why you’re seeing what you have seen there.
“I tell you that because I believe in the inside-out approach. We call home ‘The State of Dallas.’ And if you go back and look, Howard Schnellenberger used to call the Tri-Counties ‘The State of Miami.’ So we’re in Texas, arguably the best recruiting state in the country for football. But the Dallas Metroplex — 11 counties — is our home state. Everywhere else in Texas, it’s still our home state, but they are secondary areas. … Now we may have more than 40 percent, unlike Miami, because Texas is bigger than Florida, but maybe 40 percent of our players are from ‘The State of Dallas.’ Then you start to look at some outside areas.”
Let’s simplify: The focus will always be home for SMU, but unlike with Dykes’ plan, there will be more of a willingness to branch out and focus on secondary areas, as long as it makes sense. This isn’t about getting everyone from Dallas — it’s about getting the best from Dallas, which is the major change here. That’s what Miami did in South Florida, but that doesn’t mean the rest of those elite Hurricanes rosters didn’t include studs from North Florida, Louisiana and other nearby states.
Lashlee wants to make the Stone commitment a regular occurrence, not a one-off. He doesn’t want it to be big news when a fringe top-100 player commits to his program. That’s big talk for a school that hasn’t recruited at this level in 40 years. He’s talking about eventually winning battles over Oklahoma, LSU, Texas, Texas A&M, Alabama and others for Dallas prospects.
Some may roll their eyes. But Lashlee truly believes it’s doable. That’s where the ACC affiliation comes in.
“There have been so many kids who have wanted to come to SMU but didn’t because we didn’t play at the highest level,” Lashlee said. “We do now.”
SMU’s 2025 class already has four commitments — and each is a four-star prospect. Included in that group is four-star quarterback Keelon Russell of Duncanville (Texas) High, the No. 224 overall player in the class with other offers from Baylor, Ole Miss, TCU, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Virginia Tech.
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“When is the last time SMU signed four four-stars in a single class?” Lashlee asked. “Well, we have six because two haven’t made it public yet. It’s already happening.”
In multiple spots in the SMU football facility, there is signage that says: “Three-time national champions.”
“It feels good to be somewhere where that’s actually possible again,” Lashlee said. “At our previous level, it was technically possible, but it was impossible. Now we can build toward that.”
(Top photo: Ari Wasserman / The Athletic)