In 1893, a chemistry professor named Charles Coates arrived at Louisiana State University and wrote that, to his surprise, “there was practically no athletics in the student body: no football, no tennis, and only very little baseball in the spring.” A broad program of sports struck him as the kind of thing a school should have, particularly as US universities were beginning to tout intercollegiate athletics as critical to a balanced higher-ed experience and another way to justify the cost of entry. But 133 years on, sports aren’t merely the main attraction at LSU. They’re the school’s raison d’être , the blinkered obsession that consumes the university and its most prominent ambassadors.
Any doubt that the business of educating college students is just a nettlesome distraction from the business of college sports in Baton Rouge has been emphatically dispelled over the past 10 months. On the football side, the school has spent or committed roughly $162m to its last three head coaches: Ed Orgeron, the folksy national champion in 2019 who received a $17m buyout when he was fired two years later; Brian Kelly, the unloved underachiever who received a $54m buyout after being fired last October; and Lane Kiffin, the Kelly replacement whom it signed to a $91m deal a month later. Clemson, the opponent for LSU’s season opener at home on Saturday, are about to find out what all that money buys.
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In March, LSU brought back men’s basketball coach Will Wade, the turnaround artist who became a national emblem of college sports’ old pay-for-play hypocrisy when he was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing a recruiting offer seven years ago. An NCAA dragnet soon uncovered more alleged recruiting improprieties. After LSU fired Wade for cause, he resurfaced at McNeese State, engineering an unlikely reversal of fortune that eventually landed him a lucrative offer to coach back in the big leagues at North Carolina State. That stint lasted all of one 20-win season before the Tigers swooped in and began the process to bring Wade back – despite the fact that someone else was already coaching the team .
And then there’s Kim Mulkey, grande dame of LSU sports blindness. When the national championship-winning women’s basketball coach brought 17-year-old Anna Minaeva into the fold last month, more than a few eyebrows arched – and not because she plays the same position as junior center Kate Koval. It’s more that Minaeva is Russian, Koval is Ukrainian and the one notable reprieve her father, a drone operator in the Ukrainian military, took from the war was to travel to the United States to watch his daughter play.
“I cannot make a decision to not recruit somebody that can help our program because of a conflict between two countries,” Mulkey told Koval , who then unsurprisingly decided to leave the team. “For me, this war isn’t distant or abstract,” Koval wrote of her departure. “People close to me have been killed and wounded in Russian attacks, and places where I grew up and first began playing basketball have been destroyed by missile strikes.”
Mulkey’s decision to focus on basketball over all other matters would be stunning if this wasn’t the same coach who stuck to sports when one of her former players, Brittney Griner, was facing down an indefinite sentence in a Russian prison . Instead of offering Griner even a few token words of support, Mulkey said she would stay silent on the matter .
Fixation on sports certainly isn’t unique to LSU. Travel to any American college, and odds are you’ll notice the stadium well before you do the library. But it wasn’t always that way in Baton Rouge. For much of its history, the university used revenue from athletics, football most glaringly, to underwrite teaching and research – you know, actual college work. In 2015, LSU athletics transferred more than $7m to the university to support academic, research and public-service missions as part of a five-year, $36m pledge . Was it a perfect symbiosis? No. But LSU at least could say athletics had become what Coates hoped for – a tide to lift all boats.
So what changed? College sports went from a delicate experiment in amateurism that could easily blow up over a team barbecue to a full-blown arms race. Now LSU works overtime to justify its presence in the all-powerful Southeastern Conference (SEC) while competing with the even-better-funded Ohio State, Texas and arch-rival Alabama. Student-athletes have gone from being criminalized for accepting any form of compensation beyond a basic education to cowboy entrepreneurs in a freewheeling name, image and likeness (NIL) era that, among other things, has thrust former LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels – now of the NFL’s Washington Commanders – in a pitched legal battle with the university over claims to the commercial use of his old college jersey number . Athletics revenue that once helped underwrite actual academics is now invested in players and coaches in the race to win at all costs. Administrators like former Alabama coach Nick Saban, who benefitted handsomely from the old way of business, are now working hand-in-glove with the Trump administration to regulate all of this .
All the while, LSU is helping drive the transformation as it adapts to the new normal. Kiffin – who threatened to take Ole Miss’ best players with him after abandoning the Rebels to take the LSU job – has not been bashful about seeking to exploit a loophole that left the door open for former NFL players to return to college and play for money that could surpass a rookie contract in the pros. After Kiffin signed a number of players off the NFL’s training-camp waiver wire this month, the SEC scrambled to change its rules to stop the march of professionals backsliding to campus . Jack Pyburn, a standout Tigers edge rusher who turned pro earlier this year, was in line to return to school after being cut by Tampa Bay – only for Kansas City to claim him, thwarting an NIL windfall that was due to eclipse his NFL salary.
It’s not limited to football. The showpiece of Wade’s incoming men’s basketball recruiting class is RJ Luis Jr, a college standout who was on the Boston Celtics’ roster during the 2025 preseason.
Dae’Quan Wright, the first player to go from the NFL to the transfer portal, has already practiced with the Tigers as LSU sues the SEC and NCAA over the eligibility of these professional ringers , much to the “ high level of frustration ” among university presidents in the conference at Kiffin’s challenge to the supposed amateur spirit of college sports. Rival coaches aren’t exactly thrilled about the state of play either. “It’s embarrassing,” said Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, patron saint of old-school amateurism . “We have no rules. There’s no governance. I mean, it’s a joke.”
On Thursday night, a Louisiana judge saw it Kiffin and the Tigers’ way ( quelle surprise ), granting a preliminary injunction that clears a path for the NFL ringers to join the team. Earlier this week, the coach assured reporters that his NFL recruiting gambit had the full backing of his team – as if these young men, however well recompensed, would dare oppose LSU’s $91m sports lord. “This is how the real world works,” Kiffin deadpanned. The team fanzine echoed the prevailing mood. “You either play the villain or the victim in today’s NCAA,” tweeted the associate editor at TigerBait.com.
Related: Ukrainian star leaves LSU women’s basketball team after signing of Russian recruit
In this blinkered world, there are more than feudal lords like Kiffin to consider as they bend reality to fit their agendas. As LSU is a state university, it is effectively run by Louisiana’s governor, the Maga-aligned Jeff Landry. Besides appointing the board that steers the university, Landry has a heavy hand in hiring and firing the coaches (though he did invite Donald Trump to pick Kelly’s successor ) and insisted on carting a live tiger into one game despite the protests of animal rights groups and the university’s own veterinarians. Landry spearheaded the NIL war chest that is to be LSU’s ace in the hole and backed the lawsuits against the NCAA and SEC; on Thursday, the conference hit back with its own lawsuit , filed in a federal court in Alabama – for a different kind of home-court advantage, no doubt.
And this is all while Landry spearheads the great unwokening in Louisiana and pressures LSU to dismantle much of its DEI policies. The backlash to Landry’s politics has reached the playing field: in May, the NAACP urged Black athletes to reconsider attending public universities in Southern states such as Louisiana that were engaged in what it described as efforts to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation through redistricting. The NAACP offered up HBCUs as an alternative but, alas, the great migration never came. The lure of sports-obsessed schools such as LSU is still too strong to fight.
Certainly Coates, the first football coach in LSU history, couldn’t know what he had unleashed. He wanted athletics to lift all boats, but it has swamped campus life entirely. It has driven universities to sacrifice their values for the pursuit of sporting glory, in a game where winning is never enough, and it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to compete at the most basic level. If this is how the real world works now, fans cheer at their own peril.
Any doubt that the business of educating college students is just a nettlesome distraction from the business of college sports in Baton Rouge has been emphatically dispelled over the past 10 months. On the football side, the school has spent or committed roughly $162m to its last three head coaches: Ed Orgeron, the folksy national champion in 2019 who received a $17m buyout when he was fired two years later; Brian Kelly, the unloved underachiever who received a $54m buyout after being fired last October; and Lane Kiffin, the Kelly replacement whom it signed to a $91m deal a month later. Clemson, the opponent for LSU’s season opener at home on Saturday, are about to find out what all that money buys.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Andrew Lawrence. Published 4 Sept 2026, 09:00 am.
