Supported by my trusty walking cane, I hobbled out on the front lawn this morning to retrieve my local newspaper. I immediately saw a giant headline--the huge fonts reserved for reporting on major catastrophes.
I wasn't wearing my eyeglasses, so I couldn't read the momentous news. What happened?
Did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor again? Did Trump tear down the Washington Monument to make room for a new hotel? Did Ireland reject Rachel Maddow's request for political asylum?
I stumbled back into my house, trembling with deep forboding, and retrieved my peepers. My god! The news was terrible--worse than a new world war. LSU fired Coach Brian Kelly less than 24 hours after the Texas Aggies whupped the Tigers 49 to 25.
Coach Kelly had promised LSU football fans too much--a run at the National Championship during the 2025 gridiron season. Kelly bragged that LSU had spent $18 million to assemble a fearsome roster of talented players, and a shot at the national title was in the bag.
More than that, LSU had landed the nation's most promising quarterback, Garrett Nussmeier. LSU reportedly paid Nussmeier $4 million in NIL compensation, a hell of a lot of money to give a college kid. However, LSU's athletic boosters must have thought the investment was worth it for an athlete who might win the Heisman trophy and be the next Joe Burrow.
Alas, as poet Robert Burns might have phrased it, the best laid plans of Yankee football coaches often go astray. The Tigers looked less than stellar throughout the 2025 football season. The humiliating loss to Texas A & M in LSU's own friggin' stadium was the final straw. Coach Kelly had to go.
Unfortunately for LSU, Coach Kelly's weekend firing is just the first chapter in a melodrama likely to last for months. The university will have to buy out Kelly's contract, which will cost over $50 million. Where will that money come from?
The public will demand an accounting of the NIL money paid to LSU athletes. How much did each player get, and where did that money come from?
And LSU fans will be scrutinizing Scott Woodward, LSU's athletic director. Woodward is the guy who signed off on Coach Kelly's $100 million contract in 2021 and then fired Kelly yesterday evening.
This is de ja vu all over again. Woodward was the athletic director at Texas A & M when that university bought out Coach Jumbo Fisher after a disappointing football season. That cost the Aggies $75 million!
With that track record, should Woodward be put in charge of hiring LSU's next football coach? And what will it cost LSU to entice a new coach into the viper's nest of LSU athletics? Kelly's contract promised him $10 million a year for ten years. The next coach may demand $15 million.
The LSU-Coach Kelly fiasco will reverberate throughout the world of higher education. The cost of a college degree has reached an obscene level--even at public universities like LSU.
Should colleges spend millions of dollars a year entertaining football fans on a dozen Saturdays every autumn while asking parents to take out college loans so their child can get a worthless degree in sociology? What the hell are we doing?
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