ACC Membership Brings New Excitement to Campus

SMU athletic official reports sold out games and not just for Mustang football

The palpable excitement on campus due to admission into the “Power Four” ACC has reinvigorated Mustangs fandom to a fever pitch, raising the bar for SMU sports teams across the board. 

“It’s not something that just happened over a year,” associate athletic director Alex Gordon said. “It’s been invested in for a long time.”

SMU officially became part of the Atlantic Coast Conference over the summer.

“July 1st of this summer it was all-hands-on-deck to be as prepared as possible to be ready to go on day one,” Gordon said.

The Mustangs’ first ACC home game — a 42-16 win against Florida State — provided a great start. 

“We said we want to come in and compete at the highest level right away,” Gordon said. “We’re here to have a tremendous experience inside the stadium — for student athletes, for fans, for spectators.”

Ticket sales have doubled, the university reports.

“We’ve averaged over 4,000 student tickets out for the first two games that aren’t even ACC games, which is crazy,” Gordon said. “50% of our student population are claiming tickets for these games.”

The Florida State game was sold-out, including faculty staff tickets. Being Family Weekend on campus, tailgating was in full gallop and the boulevard was overflowing with food, drinks, and smiling Mustangs supporters sporting their best SMU-logoed fashions.

“The energy around campus has been great,” Gordon said. “The partnerships on campus and in the community have been really great. Everybody’s just tried to level up, knowing that we’re expecting twice the size of crowds that we’ve had for the last 10 or 15 years, that those crowds are what we’re going to deal with every weekend, not just when one of the TCUs or the Baylors come. And it’s not just football. We hosted Nebraska in volleyball and sold out 7,000 seats. It was a step-up in league, not just for football but for all of our sports.”

Area businesses — particularly restaurants — are enjoying the influx of attendees. 

“We were packed,” noted a sandwich maker with New York Subs, which has operated across the street from SMU since 1974. 

“It was more packed than the TCU game, which is hard to imagine,” said SMU grad and self-described Mustangs fanatic Mickey McGuire of the Sept. 28 ACC showdown. “When you’re playing the upper echelon of college football — names people recognize — that makes a big difference.”

In the past, many people would go to the boulevard but not the game – never buying a ticket, McGuire said. “Or they would wait until the second quarter to come in.”

McGuire saw that as a problem. “But now most people are going to the game. The atmosphere was intense right from the get-go,” the fan said. “Before, if I had an extra ticket, it was hard to find somebody to go to the game. I don’t have that problem anymore.”