By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Money talks in college football now more than ever, but maybe now it will shut up, at least for a little while.
The No. 13-ranked LSU football team and new rock star coach Lane Kiffin open preseason practice at 10 a.m. today with the season starting on Sept. 5 against No. 23 Clemson (6:30 p.m., ABC) in Tiger Stadium with ESPN’s College GameDay broadcasting from campus that morning.
Also today, approximately 20 mega donors to LSU athletics, particularly football, will meet at the Governor’s Mansion with Governor Jeff Landry and LSU president Wade Rousse for the second time in three days to continue discussions of a new state of the art financial plan to fund athletics.
LSU will try to explain that it is not entering into a private equity deal, although a major player in its financial planning is Greg Williams, the chairman and CEO of the Acrisure financial technology company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who is a private equity expert. Wink, wink. Private equity can tend to control those that enter into such business deals.
“You really don’t want to go that way,” LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry told Tiger Rag in his office last February. “Private equity is a different ballgame. They come in with a certain percentage long term. How does that look? When you sit down and talk about these things, how much is this going to cost us? You deal with private equity, they’re going to want some long term inventory. Once you get certain benchmarks, how long does that go? Short term or long term? A lot of times with private equity, they come in and start controlling things. You lose some control when you deal with private equity. But we’re going to make this work.”
LSU IS getting married to private equity. Don’t believe the spin, which LSU continues to make an art form while constantly seducing new spin doctors. LSU just thinks it can control its partners better than the type of private equity deals Ausberry warned about. So, good luck with that.
It is a new world of finance in college athletics as programs desperately try to find new ways of paying athletes via the ever-expanding – like The Blob – world of Name, Image & Likeness that began somewhat quiet and small at about this time in 2021. It was so much simpler pre-2021, back when this was all done under the table, and the right players got paid instead of virtually everyone now, including multitudes of athletes who deserve “only” a scholarship.
But groups of mega donors have been around major college programs for decades – just not in a Governor’s Mansion. Only in Louisiana. They just kept quieter and in the dark.
Now, that football is about to start, I wish they would go back to the dimly lit rooms and and envelopes of cash.
The baby, or the 2026 college football season, is due in Baton Rouge on Sept. 5, and I just want to see the baby. I’m sick of all the money talk.
Once again, college football needs to follow the lead of the NFL, which knows how to “Keep ‘Em Separated,” as the 1994 song “Come Out And Play” by Offspring so perfectly says.
During NFL training camps, which just started last week, about all one hears centers on football – not free agency or financial dealing.
The NFL is the best sport in the world as far as media accessibility, and it is best scheduled sport in the world. The league knows how to compartmentalize a calendar like no one else and puts college football’s shoddy itineraries to shame. The Kiffin Rule? Please! Fix the freakin’ calendar. They’re still trying to figure the portal calendar.
In the NFL, there is a time for coaching changes that turns to a time for free agency, which is analogous to the Transfer Portal in college football. But the NFL keeps free agency between strict dates in the spring perfectly after the season and before the draft. And then, IT’S OVER.
In college football, the portal NEVER really ends. Yes, there are portal windows, but since college football tends to have year-by-year NIL-related deals, the negotiation part of the players’ pay often never really ends. I have heard parents of players actually talking about a raise just after a game early in the season.
“The good news is for the next five weeks, we can just practice football,” then-Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy said on Aug. 16, 2024, to start a beautiful, anti-NIL-portal soliloquy.
A reporter started a question with, “All that money stuff and NIL and all that,” but Gundy interrupted with, “It’s out,” and stretched his hand out to mimic an airplane.
“It’s what I told the players,” Gundy continued. “There’s no negotiating now. Portal’s over. All negotiations are history. Now, we’re playing football. Just coaching and playing football. The business side of what we do now is we have to have those conversations with them. ‘Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking us for more money. It’s non-negotiable now. And start again in December.’ So now, we’re able to direct ourselves just at football, and that part is fun. Because there’s been so much other stuff that’s been going on, it’s been hard to really focus on football.”
Thank you, Mike Gundy. I bet Lane Kiffin and hundreds of other college football coaches feel the same way as they hit the grass today and in the coming days and weeks.
Now, Gundy went 3-9 and 0-9 in the Big 12 that year, breaking a tremendous run of 18 straight winning seasons – including eight of the double-digit-win variety – after a 4-7 campaign in 2005 upon replacing Les Miles. And he was fired after a 1-2 start in 2025.
I sure miss Mike Gundy’s attitude.
As WAFB Channel 9 sports director Jacques Doucet said on a recent Tiger Rag Radio show as football neared, “I’m so sick of hearing about money. I just want to hear about football.”
Bring it on.
It’s time to, “Come Out And Play.”
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