It’s easy to blame the players for the latest slice of college football chaos, arising from the effort by members of the high-school class of 2022 to get a fifth year of eligibility — even after they signed NFL contract. The far more appropriate target seems to be LSU coach Lane Kiffin.
CBS Sports reports that “Kiffin and the Tigers reached out to multiple players on NFL rosters or their representation in an effort to get them to bring a lawsuit against the NCAA and return to school.” CBS Sports also reports that LSU has “had conversations with others who remain in NFL camps ahead of the league’s cut day on Aug. 30.”
It underscores the obsession with acquiring the best collection of players possible. And it puts Kiffin’s justification that “they’re either going to play for you or they’re going to play for someone else” in its proper context.
Based on the CBS Sports report, Kiffin isn’t simply reacting to a development over which he had no controll. Instead, he’s hoping to reap the intended benefit of an outcome he helped engineer.
Beyond that, Kiffin and LSU apparently interfered with the contractual relationships between multiple NFL teams and their employees, by offering them alternative football employment while they already had jobs.
Although it’s unlikely that any NFL team would sue LSU and/or Kiffin for tampering with their players, it’s not a stretch to think that, once the seed of making more money at LSU than they’d likely earn on a practice squad was planted, those players attempted to set the stage to be released by their NFL teams.
Regardless of whether anything comes from it, it shows how brazen Kiffin is willing to be to get what he wants. Not that there was any doubt about it; he bailed on Ole Miss during the season to jump to a better deal with another program. It’s no surprise that, now that Kiffin has landed at LSU, he’ll do whatever it takes to have as much success as possible there.
Perhaps so that he can eventually bail on LSU to jump to a better deal elsewhere.
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