Sonny Dykes took over his SMU team early, then got absolutely lambasted by Louisiana Tech in the Frisco Bowl

The Mustangs were behind the eight ball from Play 1 in a de facto home game in the postseason.

From Play 1, nothing was going right for SMU. The Mustangs fumbled on the first play of the game, and things wouldn’t get much better in the 51-10 Frisco Bowl defeat at the hands of Louisiana Tech.

SMU had six turnovers, and was behind 42-10 at half.

The Mustangs were in an interesting situation.

New coach Sonny Dykes made his SMU coaching debut in this game, instead of the usual new coach tactic of simply observing the bowl game.

Now as for the reason Dykes took over early, it kinda makes sense. First of all, Dykes didn’t previously have a coaching job. He was an analyst at TCU, but that’s an off-the-field role.

The Early Signing Period is likely the biggest reason Dykes coached this game.

It’s changed a lot of the calculus in college football.

Mainly, it accelerated the coaching carousel a bit. Teams that changed coaches needed to get new coaches ready to roll so that they could sign as many players as possible during the Early Signing Period. The commentators on the ESPN telecast talked about Dykes’ challenges recruiting players, and said the message from SMU was much more of a slow play than the rest of the country. Most teams signed an overwhelming majority of their verbal commitments. SMU signed seven players, and has 13 as simply verbal commitments. So if Dykes is already doing plenty of work for SMU, why not coach the bowl game and at least get the returning members of your team a bit used to the way you run the team?

There’s not even a full coaching staff right now in Dallas, so we saw graduate assistants stepping up to coach position groups, and defensive coaches helping out on offense, per the telecast. It was a tough situation, and it translated to the field in a Frisco beatdown.