LSU coach Lane Kiffin waits for kickoff in the first quarter against Clemson on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026 at Tiger Stadium.
After another week of bluster, raw emotions and unprecedented drama, what do you know? LSU and the Southeastern Conference came back from the brink.
LSU isn’t going to be expelled from the SEC. That may have been some lurid, Lane Kiffin-hating fantasy of fans from Ole Miss to Tennessee, but it isn’t happening. And the heavy hammer of sanctions and/or fines against LSU and Kiffin over pushing the envelope to the legal breaking point in trying to roster players who previously took part in NFL training camps isn’t happening either.
At least not in the current circumstances and with the current information at hand.
So where do LSU and the SEC now stand in their relationship and in what one assumes is their collective future going forward? Allow me to hit the pause button for a moment and offer a theory, one that certainly could be shot through with holes in the coming days, but here goes:
If the SEC was going to punish LSU and Kiffin over things Kiffin has done and said, it had ample opportunity to do so. In the end, it had nothing to build a case on but hurt feelings and anonymous reporting that Kiffin had anything to do with urging the athletes involved in the eligibility lawsuit to take legal action.
Do I think he had something to do with it? At least part of me does. But that is an opinion. And opinion is far different from proving a fact in a court of law. The SEC’s CEOs are smart people — though I doubt some of them could tell you the difference between an end zone and an end around — and they figured out they didn’t have anything really concrete to pin on Kiffin and have moved on. For now.
But in the same way it has been better for Kiffin to stay off social media — his only two posts on his X.com (formerly Twitter) account since May 11 have been to promote companies he did offseason commercials for – it would be best for him to not pop off about the SEC or say things like “Imagine if we had pro players” as he did at halftime of LSU’s 51-10 rout of Clemson. The rest of the SEC is hot for him, and not in a romantic “Let’s get a bottle of wine and a blanket and watch the sunset from the levee” kind of way.
Meanwhile, the SEC continues to dangle a sword of Damocles over LSU’s head. A sword hanging by a thread. A thread named RJ Luis. If LSU men’s basketball coach Will Wade — who may actually give folks around the SEC a rash even more than Kiffin — makes good on his attempt to roster the former G-League player, the conference could really throw the book at LSU in terms of sanctions and fines.
Again, just a theory. But it’s a fair bet I know what the SEC is going to do about LSU as much as the SEC does.
Meanwhile, at the risk of actually talking about football, we interrupt today’s episode of “The People’s Court” to remind you that LSU will actually play a football game Saturday night against Louisiana Tech. I seem to recall the purpose of this whole thing is to play games, right? It seems a quaint notion in our currently hyper-litigious sports landscape, but I believe I’m on fairly stable ground here.
There has been virtually nothing uninteresting about the Kiffin era at LSU so far. So even this game, an in-state palate cleanser between the Clemson opener and next Saturday’s renewal of the seething rivalry (Kiffin, again) between LSU and Ole Miss is compelling in the questions it proffers.
Will the Tigers, who rolled like Patton’s Third Army over Clemson and can be expected to bring an equally ruthless intensity to Ole Miss, still be at a sharp edge for the Techsters? Will Tech, which scored 11 touchdowns in an 80-6 rout of hapless Northwestern State this past week, be at threat to LSU? Kiffin indicated at his Monday news conference that the Bulldogs definitely caught his attention, so it’s at least something to be considered.
In the end, both the SEC and LSU/Kiffin got something of what they wanted, if not all that they bargained for.
The SEC got a test case for self-governance, which is what all it’s railing about the former NFL camp players possibly being added to LSU’s roster was all about. With the NCAA being sued every time it opens the fridge, the SEC (and Big Ten) want to make their own rules. And you can’t do that if you’re worried about a flood of former professionals — a real possibility — backtracking from the NFL and NBA in ever-increasing numbers.
Kiffin got a psychological welding torch he can use to create unity in a locker room filled with players from 43 schools (including LSU), 23 states and one Canadian province. Every coach ever likes to play the “Us against the world” card. You can say a lot of things about Kiffin, but in this regard when he says that he speaks the gospel.
We already know an angry SEC pushed back hard at LSU and essentially won. A talented and angry LSU team could also do an awful lot of winning. The Louisiana Tech game is the Tigers’ own test case for that.
