College football is back.
Not the appetizer. Not the offseason lawsuits, portal drama, NIL arguments and endless speculation. The actual football is back, and we’ve got games stretching all the way through Labor Day.
So before I spend the next few days planted in front of a television — with a slight detour to actually work a college football game or two myself — here are the five things rattling around my head entering the first real weekend of the season.
1. What the hell is the SEC doing?
Seriously. What are we doing here?
On Thursday, a courtroom in Baton Rouge once again told the powers of college sports: you lose.
After SEC commissioner Greg Sankey spent more than two hours on the witness stand defending the league’s position, Judge William Jorden issued a preliminary injunction that keeps the SEC and NCAA from punishing schools over the eligibility of the athletes at the center of this case.
And the SEC still isn’t budging. In fact, they are now suing LSU in federal court in Alabama over being allowed to enforce the organization’s own rules.
I understand their argument. The league doesn’t want a world where players can sign professional contracts, go to the NFL and then decide, “You know what? College sounds pretty good again.”
Fine.
Except I don’t think that’s really what this fight is about.
This is about a group of athletes — particularly members of the high school Class of 2022 — who got caught on the wrong side of college sports changing its own eligibility rules. The NCAA moved toward a five-seasons-in-five-years model but didn’t extend the same treatment to the Class of 2022. Now those players are asking the obvious question:
Why not us?
And courts keep taking that question seriously.
That’s what makes the SEC’s all-out war so strange to me.
Maybe they’re terrified of the precedent. I understand that. But precedent is already happening all around them. Look at college basketball and Charles Bediako, who returned to Alabama after playing professionally in the G League under the protection of a court order.
College sports spent decades fighting to preserve amateurism. How’d that work out?
Now we’re watching another version of the same fight.
Kids are already making millions of dollars playing college football. Revenue sharing is here. NIL is here. Rosters are rebuilt through free agency — excuse me, the transfer portal — every offseason. Coaches make $10 million a year.
This is professional football in virtually every way except the paperwork.
Yet this is apparently the line that threatens the integrity of the SEC?
Come on.
And now the league is fighting one of its own members over it. The SEC adopted its rule barring these former pros by a 15-0 vote with LSU abstaining, and it has gone to federal court trying to preserve its ability to punish LSU.
All while LSU is preparing for the biggest game of the weekend against Clemson.
I keep coming back to one question about Sankey’s testimony: Does he personally believe this is the hill the SEC needs to die on? Or is the commissioner ultimately representing what the presidents of his member institutions want?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that villainizing LSU for taking advantage of a legal opening created by college sports’ own constantly changing rules seems ridiculous.
If you don’t like the loophole, fix the rules.
But at some point, when judges keep telling you the same thing, maybe you should consider the possibility that you’re the one who got this wrong.
