The Southeastern Conference is threatening to expel LSU from its own conference, and the funniest part of a genuinely unfunny lawsuit is watching the SEC discover, in real time, that due process was only ever a courtesy it extended to schools that lost quietly.
The mechanics of the actual dispute are almost boring by comparison. On August 25th, SEC member schools voted, by a margin the conference has been careful to describe only as overwhelming, to bar any player who signed an NFL contract from returning to college eligibility, with forfeiture on the table for anyone who tried anyway. Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris had already used up their college eligibility at Ole Miss, gotten to the league, and gotten cut loose — Wright bounced from the Eagles to the Browns before his release, Harris from the Saints — before landing on Lane Kiffin’s roster in Baton Rouge under a new five-year eligibility window the NCAA itself created — the loophole Kiffin built, not found.
A Louisiana state judge, William Jorden, granted the LSU Tigers a preliminary injunction blocking the NCAA and the SEC from punishing the school over Wright and Harris. The conference’s response to losing in court was to try suing its own member school in a different court instead: a federal complaint against LSU, Kiffin, and the school’s administration, filed the same week LSU was busy winning somewhere else.
Then Kiffin opened his mouth. Walking away from a hot-mic halftime interview with ESPN’s Holly Rowe during the LSU Tigers’ 51-10 evisceration of Clemson, a game they led 31-3 at the break, played without either Wright or Harris on the actual roster, Kiffin turned back around and added one more line: “Imagine if we had pro players.” ESPN’s Chris Fowler caught the tell live on the broadcast: “He threw that in at the end… couldn’t resist.” Neither could the SEC’s lawyers. Lane Kiffin’s hot-mic comment became legal evidence two days later.
On Tuesday the SEC amended that complaint, adding the LSU Board of Supervisors and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill as defendants and asking Judge Annemarie Carney Axon for a temporary restraining order. Buried in the filing is Section 3.1.5 of the SEC Constitution, a clause granting the conference’s presidents “plenary power and authority” over its own affairs; call it the institutional fire axe behind glass, the one nobody expected anyone to actually break. The SEC has carried that axe around for decades, through every scandal a functioning ethics office would have flagged, and never once needed it.
LSU recruiting a couple of NFL castoffs under a rule the NCAA wrote is, apparently, the fire. ESPN’s reporting on the amended complaint lays out the language: LSU allegedly “waged a deliberate, coordinated, and public campaign to recruit professional athletes,” a sentence that sounds damning on its own; then you remember the campaign in question produced two guys who got cut by the Browns and the Saints. Despite winning the injunction and still benching both players for the opener, a decision ESPN covered in detail, LSU now stands accused of institutional control failures and competitive imbalance over two men who didn’t play a single snap. Front Office Sports breaks down the full allegations: the greatest hits of conference-speak for “you scared us.”
Presidents and chancellors from the other fifteen schools meet Thursday to vote on whether to actually terminate LSU’s membership, which requires two-thirds of them to agree. No power-conference program has been expelled from anything since the Big East cut Temple loose after the 2004 season. ESPN’s Pete Thamel reports the SEC isn’t expected to go through with it; probation is the more likely outcome. The SEC’s expulsion threat against LSU always mattered less as a way to actually remove a marquee program than as a way to make sure nobody else tries what LSU tried.
The SEC’s own filing language, quoted directly, makes that clearer than anything a lawyer would say out loud:
https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/2097346080148996362
A conference meeting scheduled to “decide whether to terminate” a member institution, called into being roughly a day after the amended complaint hit the docket, reads less like due process than like paperwork sprinting to catch up with fear. Several state attorneys general, Georgia’s Chris Carr among them, had already been pushing SEC schools toward this exact hammer before the amended complaint ever showed up, which suggests the conference wasn’t building a legal case so much as performing one for an audience that was already yelling at it.
Strip away the grave legal tone and that’s the whole case: LSU proved that paying players in everything but name gets you a roster that beats Clemson by 41, and if it works once, fifteen other athletic departments start running the numbers on their own five-year eligibility guys before Thanksgiving. The SEC isn’t racing a lawsuit. It’s racing a spreadsheet. Somewhere in Baton Rouge, Kiffin is presumably still grinning about the fact that the most expensive sentence in this entire saga was one he said by accident, walking off a football field, to a reporter he thought he was done talking to.
