SEC’s hypocrisy on full display in LSU fight, but it might give conference chance to prove it can handle its own business

Among the many fascinating paragraphs buried in the SEC’s amended federal lawsuit against LSU, one broadside against the school’s administration and coach Lane Kiffin stands out for its unintended hilarity.

Behold: “[The SEC] Expressed great concern that LSU President [Wade] Rousse and Athletic Director [Verge] Ausberry have no meaningful control over Coach Kiffin or the football program at LSU.”

Uh, hello! Earth to the SEC! Why do you think Kiffin took the job in the first place? You think they’re paying him $13 million a year to be “meaningfully” controlled?

And goodness gracious, has anything else happened — other than the entire 93-year history of the conference — that might suggest SEC football coaches have never felt “meaningfully” controlled by their administrations?

A group of college presidents that for decades has found no way to deal with coaches and agents other than to get walked all over in contract negotiations, player discipline decisions and other measures of “meaningful” control now want to draw the line at Kiffin trying to play fast and loose with a couple NFL training camp cuts.

The SEC, of course, is right: If LSU isn’t going to play by the rules the conference has agreed upon, then it shouldn’t be in the conference. But finding religion now when you’re the league that went to bat for Cam Newton’s reinstatement in 2010 because Auburn was going to win a national championship? When you’re the league that sent commissioner Greg Sankey to Tennessee’s committee on infractions hearing in 2023 as a warning not to punish them too hard for 18 Level 1 violations? When you’ve allowed the Bruce Pearls, Hugh Freezes and Bobby Petrinos back into your league after they made fools out of their former employers?

Hmm, what could possibly have given Kiffin the idea that SEC coaches are not meant to be “meaningfully” controlled as long as they win? Do you think Urban Meyer was “meaningfully” controlled at Florida? How about Nick Saban at Alabama?

Puh-leeze.

There are not enough eye-rolls in the world to square the SEC’s righteous anger at LSU and the actions of every other member school at one point or another. Expulsion threats? For trying to recruit a couple backups who got cut from NFL camps as rookies? Given the entire history of outlaw programs and scofflaw coaches?

It strains credulity to believe this sudden bout of piety, outside of the necessary threat level to get LSU to back down. And for goodness sakes, we all know if Kiffin had stayed at Ole Miss and tried to pull this same stunt, the same president that is now aligned with colleagues in standing for the sanctity of the rulebook would be singing a much different tune. Keep in mind, Ole Miss was not offering Kiffin the moon and stars to stay up until the minute he signed his LSU contract last December because it had designs on “meaningfully” controlling who he wanted to recruit.

Hypocrites, all of them.

Having said that, as a simple matter of process and governance, this is an interesting and worthy experiment.

BATON ROUGE, LA - SEPTEMBER 05: LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin on the sideline during the first half of a game against the Clemson Tigers at Tiger Stadium on September 5, 2026 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Derick Hingle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) — Lane Kiffin and LSU didn’t need former NFL players in a Week 1 beatdown of Clemson. (Derick Hingle/Getty Images)
(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

As we know, the SEC has been making noise about self-governance if Congress can’t pass some kind of legislation with antitrust protection that would stop the flood of lawsuits every time the NCAA tries to enforce a rule.

I have been skeptical about the self-governance concept because the SEC — and particularly the SEC under commissioner Greg Sankey’s leadership — has not very often acted like an organization that wants to play by any rules. Could the SEC really transform itself into an organization where it would have to sanction its own members, perhaps even severely?

History would tell you no. If anything, Sankey has been weakened internally over the last couple years by his inability to stop certain members from running to judges and attorney generals in an attempt to circumvent rules and spending caps that were negotiated by the schools themselves as part of the House v. NCAA settlement.

Among the many administrators in college athletics who have failed to exert “meaningful” control when it comes to the rulebook, the current SEC commissioner should go at the very top of that list.

But LSU and the band of loudmouth sycophants currently leading that university — including Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry — have delivered Sankey a chance to grab that control through their obstinance and arrogance.

After all, what would give the SEC the practical authority to start enforcing real rules? Suing one of their own members and winning in federal court would probably do the trick.

Just look at the statement the SEC released Tuesday alongside the legal complaint: “The SEC and its member universities have the right to establish, through agreed-upon governance procedures, the rules under which they voluntarily compete and to expect those rules to be followed.”

The principle that these schools are part of a voluntary organization that plays by agreed-upon rules has always been true. They just didn’t take it very seriously and tried to paint the NCAA as the bad guy when things went wrong, never acknowledging that the schools themselves are the NCAA.

Now they’re saying that a self-governing organization works better when it has the right to administer meaningful punishments to people to break the rules — including, perhaps, expelling a longstanding member from the league? What a shocker.

If we could give truth serum to every president and athletic director in the SEC, it would be hard for any of them to make the case that the blowup over bringing back class of 2022 athletes who left for the NFL or NBA is actually about preserving fairness or preserving the ever-diminishing gap between college and pro.

Several schools in the SEC have $40 and $50 million football rosters. They are already pros.

But this is less about an ideological line than it is mapping out an endgame for the SEC. If the presidents are tired of being dragged into court every time they put a rule on the books that brings back some kind of order to their ecosystem, then they have two options.

The most straightforward way is to collectively bargain, which the university presidents are not ready to concede yet. So instead they’ll try the second option first: Show that they can govern themselves as a conference.

The NCAA has lost its ability to govern not only because of aggressive lawyers and judges but because so many exceptions to rules have built up over time into a stew of contradictory precedents. It’s much easier to argue that your client should get an extra year of this or a reduced penalty for that when you can take your pick of rules that the NCAA itself didn’t bother to enforce.

The SEC, and the major conferences generally, are not burdened by that same track record. If you want to self-govern and have real authority to enforce rules, you have to be willing to go all the way to defend them or else it’s like taking blocks out of a Jenga set until eventually it falls apart.

That’s what the SEC is trying to convey here: Not only are we willing to enforce rules to the point of kicking LSU out of the conference, but we’ll also get an injunction in federal court that blunts all the local judges and temporary restraining orders at the point of attack.

Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t.

But despite the SEC’s nauseating hypocrisy, you can’t blame them for trying.

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