As somebody who’s been in the business for a long time, I can say with certainty that you really don’t make a ton of money in print journalism. Unless you go national, you don’t make a lot in TV, either.

I point this out, because it matters. It matters because what ends up happening is you don’t really have the best people writing articles that set narratives on events. This absolutely happens in politics, but it 100 percent happens in sports as well.

And what’s going on with the way the media, both local and national with some exceptions, has been reporting on the contract buyout and firing of Brian Kelly by LSU is as good an example as you’ll find of what I’m saying.

A lot of you are utterly melting down over what are some fairly predictable events because you make the mistake of believing what the sports media – which is, if you can believe it, even less credible than the hacks on the front page of the newspaper – is publishing about Kelly’s firing and the subsequent negotiations, and what effect those are going to have on the university’s new administration and its search for a new football coach.

You should believe none of that.

Yes, Kelly Filed A Lawsuit. So What?

The big thing that has triggered meltards, media and otherwise, is the news that on Monday, Kelly’s lawyers filed a 48-page complaint in court seeking a declaratory judgement that LSU fired him without cause.

This is being reported as a big deal, but what’s in the lawsuit should tell you it isn’t.

Essentially, what matters is that LSU has twice offered Kelly a lump sum buyout, the first time for $25 million and the second for $30 million. He’s turned both of them down.

The lawsuit does not challenge the fact that LSU is now paying Kelly some $800,000 and change every month per the terms of his contract while attempting to buy him out for less. Those payments satisfy LSU’s end of the contract as they’re paid between now and the end of 2031. Kelly’s end of the contract is that he has a duty to mitigate LSU’s buyout costs by looking for another job the salary of which would offset all or part of LSU’s obligation.

That he’s suing LSU for a declaratory judgement that he’s been fired without cause is a response to negotiating tactics by LSU hinting that if he doesn’t accept a $30 million lump sum buyout, maybe they’ll explore whether he could be fired for cause, or that maybe he hasn’t actually been fired yet – which if he wasn’t, then LSU might then build a file on him and use that to fire him for cause.

Legally, it’s a defensible thing to do. Tactically, it’s significant for something else.

Remember, Kelly admits in his complaint that he’s turned down a $30 million check from LSU to go away. He could take that check right now and be free and clear to find another job.

As it stands now, he’s got $53 million and change coming to him, but it’s in monthly installments over the next six years. Apply the time value of money calculator, and you’d discount that $53 million over that period of time down to $47 or $48 million.

But if Kelly got another job as a head coach in the Power 4 conferences in that time frame, you’re probably looking at discounting the number even further, likely pushing it down below $30 million given a salary offset of, say, $4 million per year over the next five years. That would make him a bargain, for sure, but buyout situations like this commonly result in such deals.

So that last offer by the university isn’t unreasonable at all. It cuts Kelly loose and lets him largely flush the four unspectacular years he spent at LSU, giving him the narrative that, well, maybe he just wasn’t a great fit in the SEC and that’s why he’s really the coach he was at Notre Dame rather than what he was at LSU.

His name has been linked to openings at Boston College and Michigan State. Maybe they’d believe that and hire him, knowing that with the LSU buyout they could get Kelly cheaper than he would otherwise be.

Except what this lawsuit signifies is that Brian Kelly isn’t interested in coaching anymore. That was pretty obvious based on the half-assed, checked-out, mailed-in effort he offered to LSU’s players and fans over the past couple of years in particular, but the fact that he turned down a pretty generous lump sum offer and then proceeded to sue the university with what amounts to a publicity stunt tells you all he wants is money.

Not redemption.

I have this maxim. Those of our readers who have known me a while have heard me say this: perhaps the worst mistake you can make in life is a bad association, whether it’s romantic, business or otherwise, and you never quite know how bad the association is until you try to extricate yourself from it.

And Kelly turns out to be that bad association I’m talking about.

The lawsuit proves it.

But it doesn’t really damage LSU in any significant way. Now that the Louisiana Attorney General’s office has taken over LSU’s defense, what’s likely to happen is they’ll file a motion to dismiss the case based on a failure to state a cause of action. Even if Kelly gets his declaratory judgement, he’s due the $800,000 and change every month that he’s currently getting until the contract ends, but with a duty to mitigate. It closes off LSU’s efforts to explore a firing for cause, but it’s not like those efforts are serious. They’re just negotiating tactics. It would be a surprise if a judge wanted to wade into all of that.

Who knows how this comes out, but this is Kelly negotiating. That’s all. He’s just as obnoxious as LSU is. More so, in fact.

Nobody Cares About Brian Kelly’s Problems

The other thing you see nonstop in these stupid media reports is that the Kelly saga is going to somehow damage LSU’s coaching search. This is utterly asinine.

If Brian Kelly was truly a pillar of the college football coaching profession and he had wide respect for the awesome job he’d been doing at LSU, there could be some validity in saying that his firing would damage the standing of the job. But none of that is true. Everybody in the profession knew Kelly was checked out and goldbricking his way through the LSU contract. They knew it based on the fact he was absent from active recruiting over the last couple of years, they knew it based on his assistant coaching hires, most of which in the past two years had been made by then-athletic director Scott Woodward anyway, and they knew it based on how soft and sloppy his team’s execution has been since Jayden Daniels left for the NFL following the 2023 season.

The word has been out on Kelly for a while. Nobody thinks he’s been mistreated. These same media clowns trying to white-knight for Kelly based on this lawsuit of his had been utterly roasting him on a spit for the poor job and even worse attitude he’d showed.

So Kelly’s tenure ends badly, and he files a lawsuit rather than taking a $30 million payoff, and the people responsible for giving him that contract in the first place are all gone, and this is somehow a bad reflection on what a coach could do with the LSU job?

Why?

All the Kelly saga shows is that if you’re the football coach at LSU and you don’t do your damned job it becomes a mess. But everybody in the coaching profession already knew that. They knew it from seeing what the end of Les Miles’ tenure became, and they knew it from seeing what happened to Ed Orgeron once he lost focus on his job.

Not to mention they know it because every other high-profile job situation in college football turns into a mess when the head coach goes bad.

None of these guys get scared off by that. They see themselves as being the guy who can fix the mess and they expect to put in the work to do just that. Anybody who thinks he can’t do a better job than Kelly’s mailed-in performance at LSU is probably not having enough success where he is to merit a phone call from LSU’s search committee in the first place.

As for the PR and the politics and all the other things these media people are wasting time talking about, it’s navel gazing. None of that stuff has any effect on a coach who comes in with a plan and a quality staff of assistants and gets to work building a quality program – which LSU is going to pay top dollar to get.

When you see these guys writing about how LSU’s job is “damaged” by all this, their sources for that are each other. Maybe an agent or two in whose interest it is to poo-pooh the LSU job so the search committee maybe gets desperate and throws more money at his client. But none of it is real.

The fact is that LSU still has the fan base, the well-heeled donors, the NIL budget, the first-class facilities, the local recruiting base and the tradition to make this the best available job in college football. Miles and Orgeron won national championships at LSU, for crying out loud. You think some article at The Athletic or Yahoo! Sports is going to sway a top-flight coach from taking the LSU job when he knows that Miles and Orgeron have rings from coaching here?

Ridiculous.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about Jeff Landry, Scott Woodward, Bill Tate and John Bel Edwards and the various roles they’ve played in getting us here. And Friday we’re going to get into the coaching search itself and what our readers probably don’t know because the talking heads are too busy spewing dumb narratives rather than actual information.