SMU athletics director Rick Hart announced Friday he will step down at the conclusion of the 2024-25 academic year.
A third-generation athletics administrator, Hart has been SMU's athletics director since 2012. From a football perspective, the Hart era has been a successful one on the Hilltop:
-- After incumbent head coach June Jones bottomed out in 2014, Hart hired Chad Morris, Sonny Dykes, and then Rhett Lashlee to lead the Mustangs. Morris left for Arkansas after taking the team from 2-10 to 7-6 from 2015-17. Dykes peaked at 10-3 in 2019. As bitterly disappointing as it was to see him speed off down Interstate 30 to rival TCU, the end result has been positive for SMU.
Lashlee has gone 22-6 over the past two seasons with one conference title, one conference championship appearance, and a trip to the College Football Playoff.
-- SMU was among 10 founding members of the American Athletic Conference in 2013, and recently bought its way into the ACC. SMU was in Conference USA before the creation of the American, which was formed when left-behind members of the dissolving Big East partnered with C-USA's top tier to create a new conference. Houston, Memphis and UCF were the other schools to get the call up.
It's unlikely SMU boosters would have ponied up -- pun intended -- to make the 9-figure commitment necessary to join the ACC, nor would the ACC accepted them, even at no cost, without SMU's success on the football field.
SMU's next athletics director will work for a new president. Texas president Jay Hartzell announced -- a month ago today, ironically -- that he will take the same job at SMU, effective June 1. Hartzell has been a strong supporter of athletics during his time in Austin, so the job Hart leaves behind looks much more attractive than the job he accepted 13 years ago.