We are one week into the 2026 college football season and Lane Kiffin has already taken over the news cycle, which is the most Lane Kiffin thing possible.
He’s at LSU. He’s bringing back NFL players — guys who didn’t stick on a roster or a practice squad — and three or four of them are reportedly already practicing with the team. Lawsuits are flying. LSU is fighting the SEC. Dabo Swinney says Clemson won’t take the field against a roster with NFL players on it. Paul Finebaum called Kiffin an evil genius.
I agree with the evil genius part. I just don’t think anybody is describing the right kind of evil.
The NFL players question is real, and nobody has answered it
I can follow the argument for letting former pros come back to school. What I can’t follow is letting three or four of them show up willy-nilly with no structure around it.
Is LSU paying them? Because when a player shows up to an NFL camp, he gets paid. Fifty grand, a hundred grand. That’s not a job interview, it’s employment. If these guys aren’t getting paid at LSU, they should be going somewhere else — except the SEC has said no, and nobody in the Big Ten appears remotely interested. So there may be nowhere else to go.
That’s a real conversation. It’s also an offseason conversation, and we’re playing games this week.
The Key of All OF This
Here’s what I think is actually happening. Kiffin has made everyone the enemy except himself and LSU. It’s a classic “Us Against the World” move.
Do that, and you manufacture an us-against-them feeling with a fan base already convinced the league has spent thirty years tilting the field toward Tuscaloosa and Athens. He isn’t just their coach now. He’s their guy, fighting their fight, and he got there without winning a single game.
It doesn’t matter if he loses the case. It might not even matter if he loses in November. LSU fans will point at the lawsuit and say he was the only one willing to take the league on. This is the guy who was negotiating for his next job while his Ole Miss team walked into the playoff. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Call him a dirtbag. He makes the sport more interesting than it deserves to be.
My guess: this blows over inside a week. The lawsuits go away, LSU keeps its coach, and we find out at Clemson whether any of it was ever about football.
Go Big Red.
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