UNIVERSITY PARK — Sure, one could argue, Jim Phillips had to big up his newest constituent. Nobody is fond of a downer, anyways, and Phillips — the Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner — certainly didn’t want to be one when he declared that SMU could “come in and compete right away” at the university’s official welcome party in July.
The early returns suggest that Phillips didn’t just blow smoke. The Mustangs’ football team, volleyball team and men’s soccer team are each nationally ranked in their first ACC seasons. SMU football, 7-1 and ranked No. 20 in the country, has had multiple crowds of 30,000-plus spectators at Gerald J. Ford Stadium and had a strong case to host ESPN’s College GameDay this Saturday vs. Pitt. The women’s volleyball team, ranked No. 12, upset top-ranked Pitt earlier this month inside a raucous Moody Coliseum.
Your turn, men’s basketball.
“It’s great to see, we’re the biggest fans,” first-year coach Andy Enfield said of the early university-wide success on Wednesday. “We love to see the success early in the power conference. It is a jump in competition level, but the football, volleyball teams are both ranked. Our golf teams, our tennis teams, soccer teams have done very well and so we’re just really excited for everybody.”
The Mustangs — picked to finish 13th in the conference’s preseason poll — will begin their ACC tenure on Monday vs. Tarleton State. The regular-season opener, among other things, will provide SMU an opportunity to “set an identity with our team” according to Enfield, hired in the spring to help usher the Mustangs into a power conference after a decadelong run at USC.
New coach, new conference, new team. Yeah, there’s plenty left to identify. SMU returned just three rotation players (Chuck Harris, Keon Ambrose-Hylton and B.J. Edwards) from last year’s team and signed 11 newcomers. Enfield likened it to his ninth season at USC in 2020-21 when “we woke up at the end of March, after COVID happened and shut our season down, we only had five players on our roster.” Enfield’s staff filled out the Trojans’ roster and reached the Elite Eight the next spring.
“We have no idea how good this team will be,” Enfield said. “But we’re optimistic that we have seen that in the past, teams that we have recruited and coached, where the transfers and the existing, returning players came in and meshed together and have been a very, very good team.”
The Mustangs lost an exhibition against Oklahoma State on Saturday, 89-78, but had four players reach double figures and left Enfield with the impression that “offensively, we’re pretty talented.” He expects the Mustangs to field a full roster against Tarleton State, though Samet Yigitoglu’s eligibility remains a “question mark.” Yigitoglu, a 7-2 freshman from Turkey, is considered one of the top international newcomers in college basketball but has not yet been cleared to play by the NCAA.
“We’re optimistic,” Enfield said of Yigitoglu’s status, “but we have confidence in our other guys as well if he can’t play.”
Among the other guys: Junior guard Boopie Miller and senior forward Matt Cross. Miller, a Wake Forest transfer, averaged 16.5 points and 3.5 assists last season for the Demon Deacons. Cross averaged 15.3 points and 8.3 rebounds last season at UMass after stints at Miami and Louisville. Both scored double figures in SMU’s exhibition against Oklahoma State and are among 11 players on the Mustangs’ roster who’ve transferred at least once before in their college careers.
“This is not new to them as far as coming to a new program, a new school, trying to get acclimated to the surrounding area,” Enfield said. “It’s a different league for a lot of our guys. Matt and Boopie have played in the ACC fortunately, so we expect them to have a little bit of an advantage.”
SMU will take any advantage they can. The ACC — which has won 17 NCAA Championships and landed two teams (No. 7 Duke and No. 9 North Carolina) in the AP Top 25 preseason poll — presents a significantly tougher test than the American Athletic Conference, which SMU finished sixth in last season.
Challenging, yes, but Enfield, his staff and his players haven’t had to look far to find proof that the Mustangs can land softly in Atlantic (and, technically, with the additions of Stanford and Cal, Pacific) coastal waters.
“We’ll take the court Monday as an ACC member,” Enfield said. “There’s nothing better than that to compete at the highest level of college basketball.”
