Skip to main content
Join Now
Team Avatar
SMU

Rhett Lashlee promises SMU will win another national championship one day: 'We can and will'

IMG_0985by: Griffin McVeigh07/29/25griffin_mcveigh
smu-football-recruiting-rhett-lashlee-checks-in-on-4-star-sec-commit

For the first time in a long time, SMU is back in the national spotlight. Rhett Lashlee has helped the program reach heights it hasn’t reached since the late 1980s. An ACC Championship Game appearance and College Football Playoff birth were massive for the Mustangs.

Lashlee believes SMU can still take the next step and one day win a national championship. Everything is trending in the right direction, in his opinion, all throughout the university. He even admits somebody else might be the head coach when it happens but Lashlee is adamant SMU will be on top of the college football world again one day.

“There’s never been a better time to come to SMU,” Lashlee said Monday on The Paul Finebaum Show. “We’ve just got a lot of momentum, a lot of positive alignment in our program. And I know this. I know it’s a matter of when, not if, we can and will win a national championship again at SMU. I don’t know if we’ll do it while I’m blessed to be here or not. But we can do that here and that’s what excites me about SMU.

Back-to-back titles came home to Dallas in 1981 and 1982. Five years later, the program hit rock bottom and took a long time to recover. Signs were there under June Jones and even Sonny Dykes before Lashlee ultimately took over in 2022.

Since then, SMU has 29 wins over the course of three seasons. Two consecutive with 11 victories is a first in the school’s history. Doing so in the first ACC campaign only makes the accomplishment more impressive for the Mustangs. A few more steps are required before getting to where Lashlee aims to be.

Finebaum’s original question centered around his name potentially being linked to other jobs. More than anything, Lashlee took it as a sign of the positive things SMU is doing. The tide rises throughout when putting together team efforts.

“We tell players all the time, individual goals float through the team and when the team has success, everybody’s elevated,” Lashlee said. “So just because people talk about me, we have a great staff and a great team that wins. That only enhances our ability to get to that national championship here at SMU. I’m honored when people say those nice things because that means they’re saying good things about a school, program, and players.”