The death penalty is the popular term for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s power to ban a school from competing in a sport for at least one year. It is colloquially termed the "death penalty" as a nod to capital punishment, being the harshest penalty that an NCAA member school can receive.

It has been implemented only five times:

The University of Kentucky basketball program for the 195253 season.

The basketball program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and athletically branded as "Louisiana") for the 197374 and 197475 seasons.

The Southern Methodist University football program for the 1987 season.

The Division II men's soccer program at Morehouse College for the 2004 and 2005 seasons.

The Division III men's tennis program at MacMurray College for the 200506 and 200607 seasons.In addition to schools that received the "death penalty" from the NCAA, some schools voluntarily dropped sports programs for extended periods of time due to high-profile scandals. The most notable examples were in 1951, when Long Island University (LIU) shut down its entire athletic program for six years following the involvement of its men's basketball team in a point shaving scandal, and in the 1980s, when two other Division I men's basketball programs, at the University of San Francisco (19821985) and Tulane University (19851989), self-imposed "death penalties" after revelations of major NCAA violations. The next self-imposed "death penalty" by a Division I school took place in 2015, when Western Kentucky University (WKU) shut down its men's and women's swimming and diving teams after an investigation into alleged hazing.

Southern Methodist University (SMU) is a private research university in University Park, Texas, US with a satellite campus in Taos County, New Mexico. SMU was founded on April 17, 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—now part of the United Methodist Church—in partnership with Dallas civic leaders. However, it is nonsectarian in its teaching and enrolls students of all religious affiliations. It is classified among "R-2: Doctoral Universities – High Research Activity".As of fall 2020, the university had 12,373 students, including 6,827 undergraduates and 5,546 postgraduates, representing the largest student body in SMU history. As of fall 2019, its instructional faculty is 1,151, with 754 being full-time.In the 2020 academic year, the university granted over 3,827 degrees, including 315 doctorates, 1,659 master's and 1,853 bachelor's degrees and offers over 32 doctoral and over 120 masters programs from eight schools: the Edwin L. Cox School of Business, the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, the Dedman School of Law, the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, the Algur H. Meadows School of the Arts, the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, Perkins School of Theology, and the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.