LSU’s Lane Kiffin tests the NCAA’s limits, creating college football firestorm

Louisiana State University head coach Lane Kiffin quickly became the face of what many argue is wrong with modern college sports as the college football season approached this summer. 

The 51-year-old expert recruiter and protégé of University of Alabama legend Nick Saban had ditched his former playoff-bound school Ole Miss for an in-conference rival.

He was boasting about LSU’s deep name, image and likeness (NIL) budget, was luring elite student-athletes to Baton Rouge and was flirting with adding NFL rookies who had been cut by their professional teams to LSU’s roster. 

After LSU was threatened with expulsion from the SEC and sued by the league over Kiffin’s offseason recruiting methods, the coach backed off, agreeing last week not to add former pro players to his team. 

But a growing number of people around college football are pointing to Kiffin’s tactics as emblematic of what they see as a lack of fairness in college sports.

Kiffin’s bending of the NCAA and SEC’s eligibility rules, these people say, is the result of an intensifying arms race that federal lawmakers are setting their sights on regulating as part of their agenda when they return to the Capitol this week.

“We’re reading all about how Lane Kiffin is a bad actor here, and he’s certainly being painted as such, but it’s a hell of a thing when these coaches are just following court orders. When a [judge] says you can play, I don’t think we’ve ever been in a situation like this,” said Rick Hamilton, an antitrust attorney specializing in student-athlete rights and eligibility. “It’s just common sense. If you know what other [schools] can do and you’re competing against them … this is big business.”  

Arguably the hottest debate in college sports today, the controversy at LSU centers on players in the class of 2022 who declared for the NFL in the offseason but did not make pro rosters.  

Several of them sued the NCAA over its newly implemented “five seasons in five years” rule, arguing they should be able to take advantage of the rule retroactively and return to college competition.  

Three players who Kiffin had been eyeing sued in Louisiana this summer and won, clearing the way for them to be legally added to rosters of college teams in the state.  

Kiffin contended the players were fair game to recruit under the NCAA’s and Southeastern Conference’s guidelines and warned if LSU did not seek to add them, another school would.  

“The players chose us. A lot of people were recruiting them, a lot of people were offering them a lot of money,” Kiffin said on a recent episode of Pat McAfee’s ESPN program. “So, we were happy, but we realize this [pushback] was going to come with it.”  

Critics have blasted the LSU coach, arguing he is taking advantage of the........

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