This year’s Louisiana legislative session is a fiscal session, as odd-year regular sessions are, and as a result, legislators only have five slots for non-fiscal bills. This generally makes for fewer attention-grabbing measures that often get derided as distractions.

But there are always some. And this year, it seems like the top buzz-generating distraction measure belongs to Rep, John Illg (R-Harahan), who’s suggesting that the state dictate when college football games are played in Louisiana in the early season.

As scorching temperatures continue to be a concern during early-season football games, a Louisiana lawmaker is calling on the Southeastern Conference to make a change.

House Concurrent Resolution No. 13, filed by State Rep. John “Big John” Illg, Jr. (R-78), urges the SEC to schedule all LSU football games in September to begin at or after 6 p.m.

The non-binding resolution highlights health and safety concerns tied to extreme heat, noting that Louisiana frequently experiences heat indexes exceeding 100 degrees during the month. It also references dozens of heat-related medical incidents during LSU’s September 7, 2024, day game against Nicholls State at Tiger Stadium, where multiple fans required medical attention — including one who became unresponsive in the stands.

The resolution seeks to protect players, staff and fans by encouraging evening kickoffs for early-season games. It acknowledges that kickoff times are typically determined by television contracts but urges the SEC to prioritize safety in its scheduling decisions.

If approved by the Legislature, a copy of the resolution will be sent to the SEC Commissioner.

Normally, we’d be part of the chorus rolling our eyes at a bill like this. But we aren’t. It’s actually a good bill, or at least a legitimately interesting one.

We’re calling it a bill, and of course it’s just a resolution. It won’t require that LSU games in September be played at night. An actual bill dictating that would make a colossal mess given all the SEC TV contracts which require two different time slots for day games (11:00 a.m. central and 2:30 p.m. central). and there’s a real possibility the SEC might toss LSU out of the league were such a law be enforced.

Not necessarily, mind you. It’s hard to imagine LSU not in the SEC regardless of the circumstances. That said, such a bill would push a legitimate state interest that the SEC and its TV network partners (meaning Disney at this point) really ought to begin taking note of.

Specifically that we not kill any LSU fans for sitting on the east side of Tiger Stadium in the first four weeks of the football season.

And that day when UCLA came to town, we came pretty close to killing quite a few of them.

The sun was so bright and so hot for that game that people were dropping of heat exhaustion left and right and the paramedics were essentially playing whack-a-mole with the crowd. And by halftime, the east side, which is the side of the stadium getting clobbered by the sun during an afternoon game, had all but cleared out. People just couldn’t stand it.

Yes, you could deride those people for being wimps and talk about the good old days when nobody would leave. Sure, whatever – but in those good old days, before all the games were on TV, that UCLA game would have been a night game. The only day games LSU would play in Tiger Stadium were conference games, and those wouldn’t generally come until October when the weather was a whole lot more bearable.

This is actually a new thing.

Did you know that LSU was the first school in the SEC to install lighting on its football stadium? There’s a reason for that – an early-fall afternoon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, complete with the humidity that time of year brings, is one of the hottest and least comfortable environments imaginable. Especially if you’re going to be expected to sit in one place for three hours.

We could do the whole thing about how the Louisiana legislature needs to be spending its time on taxes and roads and insurance and crime and healthcare and so forth, and yes, those things are more important. And we could also do the whole thing about how the Legislature shouldn’t be sticking its nose into subjects like LSU football, that this is nanny-state government and so on.

Except when LSU fans – Louisiana citizens – throw a fit about having to risk heatstroke to watch a game live, LSU’s response is that they’re powerless to do anything about it because of the SEC’s TV contracts which dictate game times.

So what’s the recourse?

It’s the state legislature, actually.

Either that or coming up with some sort of canopy that puts the stands in the shade, which would be awfully expensive.

Illg is simply asking the SEC and Disney not to put us through another disaster like that UCLA game again. And he isn’t wrong to do so. We’d like to see that resolution get passed, just to send a message to the league and the media conglomerate, who by the way could really do itself a favor by trying not to piss off any more normal Americans given the virtually endless string of PR disasters it’s been guilty of over the past few years.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea if Illg’s resolution were to pass unanimously.

But so you’ll know, the legislators’ seats are all on the west side of the stadium. After about 4:30 or so in mid-September, those seats are in the shade. This issue might not be as urgent as it would otherwise be were they on the east side.