Indiana and Vanderbilt are two of the best teams in the country.
No, this isn’t 1980s basketball. This is today’s big-time college football.
It’s as unstable as Middle East politics.
The buzzword for the 2025 season is chaos. That makes for high-caliber entertainment, unless it’s your team getting surprised, or getting exposed.
The volatility of college sports is at unprecedented levels. The blend of the wide-open transfer portal, the allure of NIL, and the newest reality, NCAA-mandated revenue sharing with student-athletes, has produced a murky chain of command.
The fact that the players at the top end of the NCAA are getting (at least) reasonably compensated is good. The sad reality that those perceived as elite (some who are proving to be) are making quite literally millions, is not.
Can that genie be put back in the bottle? Don’t kid yourself.
Speaking of kidding, think Nick Saban will unretire? Why? It’s not money – he has plenty, he’s making more, he’s working less.
He’s no longer beholden to the whims of a mercenary agent repping the next 17-year-old future Pro Bowler. Or subject to the criticisms of a fan base or fan boys masquerading as media with half-baked podcasts or blogs.
Saban is not the solution for what ails LSU. Brian Kelly’s not the culprit, either. His numbers are not that much different than Saban’s were at this point on the timeline of his days in Baton Rouge. Yes, the signature wins and championships are lacking, but this is not your daddy’s SEC.
The deck has been reshuffled. The NFL has had parity for years. Major college football has just been introduced to the new normal.
Not every game comes down to the closing minutes, but a lot of them do, a lot more than before.
If it’s not your team whose status is hanging in the balance, it’s fun to watch.
It’s also costly to fund. The high cost of being a regular fan is one thing – it just costs more, from parking to tickets to concession stand visits, to team gear, to seat licenses, to renting tailgating slots.
Then there’s the NIL factor. Why are fans wanting coaches fired sooner than later? Because those supporters are really supporting, with their contributions to the collectives. They are not simply invested like the characters in the Dr Pepper commercials. They are pumping more money than ever into the machine and very few are willing to wait more than a little while for ROI.
LSU’s Kelly understands Tiger Nation being disgruntled despite a 5-2 record. Aside from the very real buy-in by donors and fans in the stands, there’s the sky-high hopes across the expansive fan base, heated up by the cool down from the most successful two decades in the history of the program – as good as almost any program at any point in college football history.
Kelly fanned the flames this summer when he unabashedly said LSU was ready to play with the best. Hasn’t panned out. We’ll know for certain after the Tigers try to pull off the Aggie-Crimson Tide two-step, where the degree of difficulty was already extreme before injuries to some of LSU’s best front seven on defense and one of their few solid offensive linemen.
But what was the man supposed to say 2-3 months ago? He was wrong about the O-line and that’s the crux of the problem. He couldn’t have anticipated the still mysterious but undeniably impactful torso injury that helped take QB Garrett Nussmeier from Heisman Trophy candidacy to mediocrity – along with constant pressure from defensive fronts.
“I’ve been 35 years in this business, 35, and it’s ever changing. The stakes are high, the passion is great,” Kelly said Monday. “It’s the nature of the business. It brings communities together, it brings states together. It brings so much hope.”
Barring stunning outcomes in the next 1-2 games, Tiger fans will be tormented for the rest of 2025. But LSU’s program isn’t descending into Dante’s Inferno.
Distressed by this stretch? It’s the turbulence you hope your flight never hits – disturbing, but it won’t last. Unless those in the cockpit panic.
LSU really is too big to fail. Its NFL pipeline is filled with recent, current and future Pro Bowlers, and that means everything to the kind of recruits and transfers needed to keep the Tigers on the top shelf. Tiger Stadium on Saturday is as good as it gets. There’s not a facility or a resource the program lacks.
But dump $53 million buying out Kelly’s contract, and more money to pay out assistants’ deals, and who’s the sure-fire hire to make every year a dream season? Jimbo Fisher? Tom Herman? James Franklin? Lincoln Riley? They all sounded great not long ago. Wasn’t Lane Kiffin run out of Oakland, L.A. and Knoxville?
As Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank Redemption, Red Redding, said: “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
His pal, Andy Dufresne, provided the counterpoint, reaching that dreamy Pacific Ocean beach that he foresaw in a letter to Red.
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Not even with a bad game, or a disappointing season, for your favorite team.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com