Politics
Lane Kiffin Picked Through NFL Castoffs and the SEC Lost Its Mind
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Lane Kiffin, the head coach of LSU and a man whose entire career has been a performance art piece about how much the football establishment deserves to be embarrassed, used the transfer portal this offseason to sign players who had been cut by NFL teams. Not recruited away from other programs. Cut. By professionals. Players the NFL looked at and said, formally and in writing, no thank you.
The Southeastern Conference, which generated $853 million in revenue last year and distributes that money to member schools partly through a set of rules that exist primarily to ensure players cannot be paid a meaningful portion of it, responded to this development by threatening to expel LSU from the conference.
Stephen A. Smith appeared on ESPN, as he does, and addressed the SEC's position directly. "Sit your a-- down," he said. This was, by several measures, the most coherent thing anyone said about this situation all week.
The specific rule the SEC is invoking has not been articulated with any precision publicly, which is itself a kind of institutional achievement. The conference has identified a behavior it finds threatening, declined to explain which bylaw it violates, and proceeded directly to the nuclear option. This is the governance equivalent of a landlord threatening eviction because he doesn't like your attitude.
Kiffin, for his part, has not backed down, which is consistent with a coaching biography that includes being fired by Al Davis via a press conference Davis held without telling him, being fired by Nick Saban via a tarmac confrontation at an airport, and somehow surviving both of these events to become, at Ole Miss and then LSU, one of the more innovative offensive minds in college football. The man has been publicly humiliated by people far scarier than the SEC commissioner and he is still here.
The players in question are adults who played professional football and were subsequently unemployed. Kiffin offered them a roster spot and, under the current NIL framework, presumably some form of compensation that is technically a marketing deal and not a salary, because the NCAA has decided that the difference between those two things is the last hill worth dying on.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey released a statement describing the situation as a matter of "competitive integrity," which is the phrase institutions use when they mean "someone found an advantage we hadn't thought to prohibit yet." Sankey did not explain how signing a 24-year-old who spent three weeks on the Kansas City Chiefs practice squad before being released constitutes a threat to competitive integrity, but the statement ran to four paragraphs and mentioned integrity six times, so presumably the math is in there somewhere.
The underlying logic of the SEC's position, followed to its conclusion, is that LSU should be barred from recruiting players who are too good. The NFL already screened these men. The NFL made a determination. The SEC's argument is essentially that its member schools are entitled to a player pool that the professional league has pre-rejected, and that going outside that pool is cheating.
This is the no-outside-food rule applied to human beings.
Stephen A. Smith, a man who has made a career out of being the loudest person in any room, was correct this week. The SEC issued a threat it cannot cleanly justify, against a coach it cannot easily intimidate, over players it has no legitimate claim on, and it did so while sitting on nearly a billion dollars generated by the unpaid labor of college athletes.
Lane Kiffin went through the discard pile.
The conference called it a crisis.
The players in question are reportedly practicing.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/stephen-smith-blasts-sec-threats-kick-lsu-out-conference-sit-your-a-down