SMU ponied up to join an exclusive Power Four club and receive an invitation from the ACC ahead of the 2023 season. The Mustangs crashed the party in 2024 by reaching the ACC Championship Game and the College Football Playoffs. The Cinderella season proved how far the program has come over the last decade. But a loss to Clemson for the ACC title and, more specifically, the defeat at Penn State in the CFP proved how far they need to go. 

The last two programs to rise into true national relevance are Clemson and Oregon. SMU wants to be next. That’ll take more than money. There will be 136 college football teams at the FBS level in 2026, but only 18 have a real shot at winning the 12-team playoff. Winning a national championship requires collecting high school talent at a high rate over years. There aren’t more than 20 schools that do that. 

The Blue Chip Ratio, created by Bud Elliott in 2013, measures the percentage of four- and five-star talent signed by each school. A national championship roster needs four- or five-star prep talent to make up at least 50 percent of the roster. The lowest since the creation of the Blue Chip Ratio was Florida State’s 53 percent in 2013, Clemson’s 52 percent in 2016, and Michigan’s 54 percent in 2023. All three of those teams were quarterbacked by Top 10 NFL draft picks.  

SMU built its roster into a conference championship contender through the transfer portal under Sonny Dykes and now Rhett Lashlee. Over Lashlee’s first two full cycles in charge, he signed 67 portal players to just 40 high school prospects. That’s the only way the Mustangs could lure high-end talent to the Hilltop. They scored the random big recruiting wins like Preston Stone, but more often than not, SMU was a bridesmaid and not a bride. The next step requires commitments. 

“We could continue to win with the portal model or a model that was half portal and half good high school players, but if we want to win championships at this level, national championships, we’re going to have to build through Texas high school football players,” Lashlee said. “We need to keep the best players in Dallas home and convince a lot of other really good players across the state to come to SMU.”

Lashlee played at Arkansas and coached at Auburn and Miami, so he knows what it takes to recruit at a high level. The Mustangs wanted to grow their personnel staff from three full-time employees to seven as the ACC invite provided access to a different type of high school prospect. Offensive coordinator Casey Woods reached out to a friend at Oklahoma, J.R. Sandlin, for prospective names to vet for the open general manager position at SMU in December. 

Sandlin provided a few names and went back to helping the Sooners sign their 2024 recruiting class. A month or two later, Woods and Sandlin were speaking again and Sandlin was impressed with the plans at SMU. He felt the Sooners were slow to build out the personnel department ahead of the move to the SEC and was pleasantly surprised that the Mustangs were getting ahead of the curve and more than doubling the size of the department he was running in Norman. 

“Casey, are you still looking for names for that GM job at SMU?” Sandlin asked Woods during their next conversation. 

“Yeah, who you got?” 

“J.R. Sandlin.” 

Sandlin was hired soon after that and started as the GM for SMU in late February 2024. That was the first recruiting win for Lashlee & Co. over Oklahoma. But it wouldn’t be the last. SMU has made it a mission to improve its recruiting footprint. The Mustangs big game hunt now. They signed the 31st-ranked recruiting class in the country in 2025, the best in school history. SMU’s recruiting classes from 2015-2024 ranked 77.2 nationally on average. The current 2026 class ranked 19th in the country. 

“We hope to continue to go that way,” Lashlee said of the climb up the recruiting ranks over the last two cycles. “We’re in the state of Texas. We’re in the City of Dallas. There is no better recruiting base than where we’re at. We have access to the best high school talent and the best coached high school talent in the country, so it makes perfect sense that now that we’re on the biggest stage and can compete with anybody on the field that we should be able to recruit in the same way.”

Lashlee & Co. aren’t setting an artificial ceiling for their recruiting efforts. The goal is to sign the best class possible and they’re done being moved off their targets by bigger brands. The Mustangs have the money to compete. The ACC provides the platform. The on-field results last year provide the proof. The Ponies can run with anybody. 

“Maybe Ohio State comes into Dallas and beats us for a kid we want, but maybe they don’t. That’s where we’re trying to get to,” Woods said. “We want to beat Texas for a player. We want to beat Texas A&M for a player. That’s how we build a roster that keeps us in the national conversation and we can do that here if we keep winning.”

Sandlin believes in building a roster with a five-hour radius. He wants SMU to be first to the punch with every major recruit in that area. First to offer. First to invite to a camp. First to host a recruit at a game. If the Mustangs can conquer their five-hour radius, they ceiling is the roof. They signed a five-star offensive tackle from Houston last cycle. They flipped a quarterback commit from TCU. The staff believes SMU can eventually sign the best class in the ACC and a Top 10 class in the country. And that they can do it with mostly Texans from that radius. 

“We want to be a team that a lot of Texas is proud of. We think we can be on the national stage with a roster built mostly with Texas talent to honor our base,” Sandlin said. “We are a stock that is hot and climbing. I’d say, get on board."