I didn’t get to this on Friday, and we had a pretty full boat of content so I let it go until today, but on Thursday there was a column by University of Florida grad Matt Hayes, writing from his perch at USA Today, which was so sanctimonious and so abjectly ridiculous that it wasn’t enough just to snicker quietly about it.

It’s about LSU’s new status as the villains of college sports for doing… things that other schools are either doing, or trying to do but not quite as successfully.

I thought about answering this with a broad defense of LSU’s athletic department, and then I thought about addressing it based on the low intellectual candlepower legacy sports media is cursed with, or the corruption clearly visible in which writers like Hayes will slavishly defend the Powers That Be in college sports in an effort to bail them out of their messes. But it struck me that there was so much wrong with Hayes’ piece that it really needed to be deconstructed and answered point by point.

So here we go.

The title of this thing is “LSU is just begging to get kicked out of the SEC.” Which is a stupid, clickbaity headline which presents as a possibility something which is distinctly not going to happen. Nobody has been kicked out of the SEC for the better part of a century, and when schools leave the conference (Tulane and Sewanee, for example), it’s because they couldn’t compete on the field. LSU is possibly the single most lucrative brand in all of college athletics, or if it isn’t it’s definitely one of the top five or 10. LSU isn’t going anywhere.

And it only gets worse from there…

It’s almost as if LSU is just begging to be kicked out of the SEC.

Standing up, bowing its back and staring into the eyes of the league’s presidents and chancellors and daring them to make a move. Yeah, we’re bat crazy, so what?

We’re your bat crazy.

Not for long if you keep this up.

We already covered this. Hayes’ first few lines reinforce a contention which is ludicrous on its face and immediately destroys whatever credibility anything that follows might contain. Not that it bothers him at all.

If you can’t comprehend the utter lunacy that is LSU since the end of the 2025 football season, you’re not alone. There are 15 colleagues in the SEC who have no idea what in blue blazes is going on in Baton Rouge, too.

Oh, really? This should be good.

It’s bad enough to fire football coach Brian Kelly with $53 million on the table. Bad enough to then try to torpedo a fellow conference member’s College Football Playoff run by backing up a truckload of cash and telling Lane Kiffin to hop in, leave Ole Miss high and dry and save LSU.

Somebody was willing to come up with the money to buy Kelly out. What business is it of Matt Hayes’ that LSU took up a collection to dump him? From the standpoint of football performance, Kelly’s firing was hardly a shock – it was the size of his buyout that mattered, and the athletic director who agreed to that insane contract got rightly fired for having put LSU in a position to have to make such a big ask of its donors.

Kelly’s buyout wasn’t the biggest in college football history. Texas A&M paid an even bigger one to Jimbo Fisher, though interestingly enough it was also Scott Woodward who put the Aggies in that situation. The point is that LSU didn’t do anything unprecedented by firing Kelly.

Oh, but they hired Lane Kiffin and “torpedoed” Ole Miss’ playoff run?

Matt Hayes, as said above, is a Florida grad. Florida attempted to do the exact same thing LSU did – hiring Kiffin away from Ole Miss – but failed. Why is LSU the bad guy for succeeding in luring Kiffin but Florida doesn’t deserve a mention for the attempt?

Besides, Kiffin offered to coach Ole Miss through the playoffs. He gave his successor Pete Golding the assistant coaches who were coming with Kiffin to Baton Rouge for the playoffs, which he didn’t have to do.

Bad enough to obliterate the spirit of the private NIL rule (and College Sports Commission clearinghouse), and spend nearly double of the revenue share budget (about $17 million) on private NIL deals ― and have a roster worth nearly $50 million for Kiffin’s first season.

Why is this a problem? Kiffin raised the money to lure a competitive roster, people were willing to spend it, and LSU has rich, happy players who’d better perform at a high level as a result. No rules were broken in those NIL deals, and none of them are different than Texas, Texas A&M, Georgia or LSU’s other competitors are doing with their players. Ole Miss’ quarterback Trinidad Chambliss got a local judge to give him an injunction granting him a sixth year of eligibility on the skinniest of justifications because Chambliss is going to make more money playing quarterback at Ole Miss than he would have made being taken in the NFL Draft as a 2nd round pick.

But LSU is a villain for issuing lucrative NIL deals to its players. Got it.

Bad enough to rehire a basketball coach who, the last time he was around, left the program in shambles and on NCAA probation (yes, kids, this used to be a thing). And in the shock of all shocks, Will Wade is at it again, desperately trying to add ineligible transfers to a roster that currently sits at four players.

Will Wade had LSU as a routine NCAA Tournament participant and he’d put a roster together that at the time was seen as a prospective Top 10 team. When he was fired, yes, the program fell into a shambles because the entire roster went into the portal. How is that Wade’s fault?

And Wade was rehired after his role in that FBI wiretap scandal. Other coaches, like Sean Miller at Arizona and Bill Self at Kansas, were never fired in the first place.

By the way, LSU’s roster has a lot more than four players on it. They just haven’t been publicly announced because he’s relying on some European players and some 5th-year transfers. Hayes knows this, because presumably he actually follows college basketball, so the column is utterly disingenuous.

Bad enough that the governor of the state of Louisiana is essentially running the joint.

This is an accusation which is pretty soft factually, but to the extent it isn’t, LSU is Louisiana’s flagship university and the governor is held accountable for the institution’s performance. Far too many governors, particularly in red states, have been absentee landlords standing still as left-wing university administrators have run amok and turned those campuses into race-communist indoctrination centers.

And in LSU’s case, idle public leadership allowed Scott Woodward to make some of the dumbest contracts in college sports for unproductive coaches, which ultimately led to the past academic year being the worst in memory for men’s sports. So yeah, Jeff Landry getting involved is probably necessary and most people around LSU now think the university is in a better position now than it was a year ago.

Bad enough to hire an athletic director who, in 2021 as deputy athletic director at LSU, served an unpaid, 30-day suspension for his involvement in the mishandling of a number of sexual misconduct reports.

Yes, this doesn’t look great. On the other hand, the previous management both of the state and the university wanted to protect a local moneybags donor who had essentially adopted an athlete who was beating up his girlfriend, and if Verge Ausberry had handled the case in a way different from the way that got him suspended, he almost certainly would have either been fired or had the handling altered from above. That’s not a good look for LSU or for Louisiana, or for Ausberry, but the idea that something like this could only happen here is pretty disingenuous. Hayes can look at his own back yard in Gainesville and find more than enough similar examples to occupy his time.

And now finally, bad enough that when the SEC presidents and chancellors this week took a stand against signing former players who had signed professional contracts, LSU’s response was, essentially, we’ll see what happens.

Yes, because there are court cases which have supplied injunctions to that effect. Maybe Matt Hayes is unfamiliar with the concept that a judicial order supersedes an SEC rule.

LSU voted along with the other presidents and chancellors in declaring the league would not accept NFL, NBA or WNBA players on league rosters. That vote was 16-0.

LSU, however, abstained from a league vote — which was 15-0 — to confirm stiff penalties against conference members who do so.

So what? It isn’t like anybody believes those penalties will actually be enforced.

All of this, mind you, in the past nine months under the swift stewardship of The Gov, Jeff Landry. Because no university president or chancellor in their right mind would make such bold moves in direct opposition of the league’s wishes.

The fabric of the SEC, the league’s DNA since the early years of the modern era under commissioner Roy Kramer, has been unwavering, unanimous movement. No matter the issue, no matter its impact, the 10 (and then 12, and then 16) schools stood together and voted unanimously. On everything.

And maybe that’s not altogether a great thing. Somehow Jeff Landry is the problem with the SEC? Whose water is Hayes carrying here?

They play together, they earned together. Mississippi State is just as important as Alabama, and earns just as much money. To the dime.

Everyone has a voice, but after debate and discussion, they’re all in it together. Until now — until LSU decided it wasn’t happy with the idea of penalties for those who add professional players to their rosters.

LSU abstained from a virtue-signal. This is what Matt Hayes wants you to think merits LSU getting booted out of the conference.

Sure, we’ll hop on board that it can’t be done, but want no part of the penalty phase of the operation.

The obvious question: What is LSU’s end game?

To win, Matt. If there are eligible players who can help LSU win, LSU will go and sign them. Just like those 15 other schools whose presidents chose hypocrisy and sanctimony in voting to impose those penalties they know will be enjoined by the courts. Kiffin is supposed to just let those players sign with teams on his schedule? Why? To please you?

Is adding three players to an already stacked roster capable of winning the national title so important to The Gov, that he’s willing to risk membership in the strongest conference in college sports? Because that’s where this thing is headed.

No, that isn’t where this thing is headed. And everyone knows LSU isn’t leaving the SEC.

If the SEC says no, and LSU says yes and signs players who previously played in the NFL, NBA or WNBA, do you really think LSU is going to stop there?

Everyone involved, and Kiffin in particular, is noting that what’s at issue is a specific class of players who should have been eligible for this current academic year under the 5-for-5 rule, but were denied that eligibility by an utterly incompetent NCAA, and are winning injunctions in court. And some of them have gone to pro-league camps because they were told they couldn’t remain in school, and they didn’t make a roster.

It isn’t LSU arguing that they’re eligible, it’s the courts. LSU is simply agreeing to sign eligible players. And LSU is hardly alone in doing so. The players LSU has signed were pursued by other SEC schools.

Furthermore, Kiffin has made it clear that everything he’s doing with these players is contingent on their eligibility, whether that’s granted by the NCAA or a court. So this scenario Hayes is painting is not reality, it’s fantasy – because LSU’s new acquisitions are only going to be on the field if other teams’ acquisitions made under the same conditions also are. And there will be several of those, quite likely among teams on LSU’s schedule.

The Gov will simply say we didn’t agree to the penalty phase of the operation, so we’re not agreeing to our coach being suspended for 50% of the season. He’ll be on the field, thank you.

No, not the Gov. The judge. There has already been one judicial order enjoining the SEC from enforcing penalties against schools rostering newly-eligible players.

And we’re not going to pay 50% of our football (or basketball) operating budget as a penalty.

At that point, the other 15 SEC presidents and chancellors say goodbye to LSU and hello to North Carolina or Duke. Or both.

This is a Matt Hayes fantasy. It will not happen.

Because LSU can’t get away with a power move like that, one that would set precedent for other moves by LSU and potentially, others in the league. One school isn’t bigger than the conference.

One school that, when separated from the SEC, isn’t as attractive as it thinks it could be. How monetarily attractive is LSU as an independent, playing an independent schedule?

It’s hard to say, but LSU would have a clear line into the college football playoffs every year just like Notre Dame does if it were to go independent.

Or worse, playing in the Big 12 (which would do backflips to add LSU) against Utah and the Kansas schools and the Arizona schools and wake me when it’s over.

Take a deep breath, Gov. You’re in over your head.

Walk away from the argument before it’s too late.

We’re honestly amazed that Hayes was  given a go-ahead by the USA Today editorial staff to publish such a stupid column. It starts with a fantasy premise and gets worse from there.

LSU is doing what everybody else is doing. Is LSU doing more of it? Sure, probably. That’s mostly because LSU has new coaches in football and men’s basketball who are in quick-rebuild mode, and both coaches know that aggressive recruiting through the transfer portal and methods beyond the old high-school recruiting model is the way to go. The current national champions, Indiana in football and Michigan in basketball, were built almost completely through transfer portal mercenaries.

But Matt Hayes is either a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist howling at the moon, or else he’s a hypocrite shilling for his alma mater who seems to want to do all the same things LSU is doing but isn’t very good at it.

Either way, his opinion can be rightly discarded. If judges around the country are willing to provide injunctions to 5th-year players, LSU won’t be the only school rostering them. And when that wave washes over college sports, we’ll listen for Hayes’ apology.