A new season always brings high expectations, but recent success has made them even higher for this year's SMU football team. 

The Mustangs have won 11 games and reached their conference championship game in back-to-back seasons and are coming off a berth in the College Football Playoff. SMU opens the 2025 campaign at 8 p.m. Saturday against East Texas A&M.

"Game week's here, we're excited about that," head coach Rhett Lashlee said. "East Texas A&M (head coach) Clint Dolezel, got a lot of respect watching their film for what he does. … When you watch them play on film, they play the right way. … Excited to get to play them and really just play someone else."

It will be the first game in an SMU jersey for 42 players who joined the team this offseason. They have spent the spring, summer and fall practicing against each other and are ready to have someone else across the line of scrimmage.

"We really need to play someone else just to see where we stand," Lashlee said. "I think we've got a long way to go. Just like they say in East Bound and Down, 'Long way to go and a short time to get there.' But we need to play somebody to see where we stand. … Saturday night can't get here fast enough."

East Texas A&M isn't that far removed from winning a Division II national championship and made the move to Division I FCS in 2022. But the Mustangs aren't as worried about the opponent as they are about going out and taking advantage of the chance to play.

"The way we look at it, we get 12 guaranteed opportunities to go play football, so why not go full speed and try your hardest each and every game?" SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings said. "A team like East Texas A&M, they've got great athletes around the board, so it's not going to be a slouch game. It's making the best of our 12 moments this year."

And the Mustangs aren't taking anything for granted.

Not only is the opponent somewhat of an unknown, but SMU is also somewhat of an unknown to itself. The Mustangs will have at least 10 new starters with plenty of other new players on the depth chart.

"Game 1s are just, they could come out and run a totally different defense, a totally different offense, and so could we," Lashlee said. "You never know what your opponent's going to do, but how guys respond … you learn a lot. We have a lot of guys in new leadership roles that have been here … and we have a lot of guys that we need to count on this year."

Of those new players on the depth chart, eight are true freshmen, along with another four redshirt freshmen. That is a byproduct of the success SMU has had the last two seasons that has translated into recruitment.

The 2025 recruiting class was the highest-rated class in SMU history in the recruiting ranking era, with the highest-rated recruit in offensive tackle Dramodd Odoms. While there might not be pressure on any of them, there are higher expectations on them, too.

"I think it's a credit to the fact that we're in the ACC, we're playing a different caliber of ball, we've had success that has attracted higher-caliber kids out of high school," Lashlee said. "We've been able to shift our focus more that way and not take as many transfers. If we're going to do that and you're going to go out and get really good players to pick SMU over bigger programs like they did, then they need to go out and play through their development, maybe a little faster than we've been able to do in the past."

No one at SMU is complaining about those expectations. These kinds of expectations have been a long time coming. 

Even though some of the big names returning to campus come from the Pony Express era or more recent success, there is another group that Lashlee wants to credit for the Mustangs return to national prominence.

"Probably, the most valuable guys that nobody talks about are the late 80s and the 90s guys that came back when the program was trying to come back," Lashlee said. "They took a lot of Ls, but they sustained us to get us back to here. We want all those guys to be around."

Sustained success is the goal. But the Mustangs aren't quite there yet. That's why they know the margin for error is small until they are able to prove they belong year after year.

"We have to, the way it went (in the College Football Playoff), we're probably not getting the benefit of the doubt next time," Lashlee said. "We need to be clearly in, I would think, until we can create a brand here that we want to, to where we get that benefit of the doubt. That's what we want to get to here. I don't think we've earned it yet."

But SMU is at least putting itself in the conversation. The Mustangs are on the radar now, somewhere they haven't been going into a season for a while.

SMU is ranked 16th in both preseason polls, its highest preseason ranking since 1985. Another sign that the Mustangs are doing something right. Now they have to keep it going.

"I think that shows that we have earned the right to at least be thought of more favorably than in the past," Lashlee said. "... The fact that we're ranked 16th doesn't mean anything in terms of wins and losses, but it does show that the growth and the momentum of the program is going in the right direction. Can we maintain and sustain that is where we are right now."