paper tiger

Now that the charade that college football players are amateurs is over, more than ever college football is a business. It’s the entertainment business. ESPN paid 3 billion to for the rights to SEC football.

ESPN plans to make money on that investment. TV ratings drive their profits. The higher the tv ratings, the more ESPN can charge their advertisers.

To drive ratings you need stories, plot lines, controversy, stars, heroes and villains. No one in college football today moves the needle on tv ratings more than Lane Kiffin. That became more evident with the whole injury list episode.

The LSU Ole Miss game was already being hyped as the biggest must watch game this year. Then Tuesday night Kiffin drops the injury list bomb that Leavitt was doubtful. That became the lead in topic of virtually every college sports show, podcast or message board in the country. Was Kiffin thumbing his nose at the SEC and how unenforceable injury lists can be? Was he trolling Ole Miss? Lol, probably both.

Some have worried about the 25k fine that LSU could get if the SEC finds LSU was untruthful with their injury list. Leavitt missed practice, one can argue just about any injury can make a qb doubtful. More importantly, 25 k is peanuts compared to the value of having your program lead in topic all day. Thats free advertising worth millions, not to mention that controversy drives the ratings even more.

And I bet the ESPN guys on the business side of their business are loving Kiffin. The whole NFL player controversy, the threat to expel LSU, Kiffins snarky Clemson halftime remark, Kiffins messy exit from Ole Miss and now his injury list troll is making the game more must watch than ever.

Kiffin is probably a thousand times more valuable than Sankey is to ESPN and to the SEC. College football is a business now. On the player side, Arch Manning might be your biggest needle mover for ratings. I do not know that anyone is close the Kiffin in that regard. He just needs to win to back it up.

Anyone with any sense knows that LSU leaving the SEC would be bad for the SEC, bad for LSU and bad for college football. It’s now a pride thing between Sankey and whoever actually is calling the shots at LSU.

The presidents of the other SEC universities are a collection of very smart people. While collectively they probably do think that LSU, Kiffin and Wade are pushing the envelope on the eligibility of pro athletes and want to show solidarity with their commissioner, they are also collectively are smart enough to know kicking LSU out is lose/lose for everyone. Smart guys will find a way for cooler heads to prevail.

I do not have any inside information. I’m just making the observation that kicking LSU out of the SEC is a lose situation for everyone and thats obvious. Sure there might be a president or 2 who have it out for LSU, but most know how dumb that would be.

Someone, or group of people, are going to step in and find the off ramp to let things cool off before it goes nuclear. I dont want out of the SEC. LSU has a rich history of many sec rivalry’s against other SEC schools across may sports. I dont want to lose that. I do not think the SEC presidents want to lose that either, much less lose the revenue and prestige LSU gives the SEC. LSU actually getting voted out of the SEC seems highly unlikely.

One potential player are the networks who bought the sec tv rights. The networks may easily demand refunds from the SEC if they lose the rights to LSU, one of the biggest brands in sports, and the rights to cover Kiffin, probably the most talked about Coach in college football. I could even see Saban wheighing in and having some influence.

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None seem serious

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Alexander is back playing, probably was just a cramp. Whatever injuries Lacy and Kinsler have appear serious enough to prevent either one from returning to the field tonight in a close game. That sounds no bueno to me for Ole Miss.

Former LSU tiger JT Lindsey is next up at running back for Ole Miss after Lacy injury. That seems quite the drop off.

There are only two weeks to when LSU plays Ole Miss. If Lacy is hurt bad enough where he can’t return to the filed in a close game tonight, it would sure concern me if I were an Ole Miss fan if he can be at full speed in two weeks if he cant get back into the game tonight.

It’s kind of a win/win either way to me. It’s probably best for LSU and the LSU/Ole Miss game if both teams come in undefeated. It would be the game everyone in the country watches. LSU gets more credit for beating an undefeated Ole Miss.

That said, it ain’t ruining my night if Ole Miss gets beat by Louisville and Golding starts out 0-1 after all he has been running his mouth about LSU.

I don’t see OIe Miss living up to their ranking. The poll voters are underestimating how much of Ole Miss success last year was due to Kiffin.

A dangerous precedent was set when a Mississippi Supreme Court, laden with Ole Miss alums and supporters, used home cooking to overturn the NCAA ruling that made Chambliss ineligible. Just about every knowledgeable college football fan could see the NCAA correctly applied is rules to declare Chambliss ineligible and decried the home cooking court ruling that restored his eligibility.

Similarly, just about everyone outside of Louisiana hates the idea of the courts restoring eligibility of players who have gone pro. Truth be told, if a Texas court was ruling players who signed contracts with the Dallas cowboys eligible to play for UT or Texas A@M, 99% of LSU fans would be crying foul too.

The culprit is NIL which has totally annihilated the already blurred line between amateurs and pros in college sports. Some college kids make more money than pros. Blurred lines and vague rules are fertile grounds for home cooking by local judges who can give stretched interpretations to outdated NCAA rules to benefit their state schools.

The solution to take this power away from local judges and put every school on a fair and level ground over eligibility issues is to establish a back and white eligibility rule that completely removes subjectivity. Set age limits for college eligibility. For example, have a rule that anyone whom is 24 years La or under on Sept 1 of any season is eligible for that that season, anyone who turns 25 before September 1 is not.

So I know anyone can come up with some reasonable objection to such a rule. I will not argue it’s a perfect rule. But it’s not an arbitrary rule and would remove the power of local courts to play favorites. The only exhibit needed at trial would be a birth certificate. The only issue at trial would be the legitimacy of the birth certificate. If Chambliss and Pyburn are 24 years old, let them play college. If they are 25 they would be ineligible.

Just let go of the fiction of college players being amateurs because they have not signed a pro contract. Colle amateurism is a fiction. Some college football players are making millions with NIL, more than some NFL players. The best and easiest rules to enforce are rules with the brightest lines that remove subjectivity. Age limits, while not perfect, would give bright line rules where we can stop pretending amateurism is the issue.

Take away the homerism of local judges. Reduce all the whining of talking heads on sports shows. Are an age limit. No doubt there would be suits challenging age limits, but thats a lot brighter and easier line to litigate than amateurism issues.

Thanks for the hard work on depth chart. When we play Clemson, do you really think Dylan Carpenter starts over Jordan Ross and Lamar Brown? Is Carpenter having that great a camp as has been reported or is Jordan Ross falling below expectations at LSU as he did at Tennessee?

Ross got the reputation of being an under performer at Tennessee so I guess Carpenter beating him out is no great surprise. Beating out Lamar Brown to start, even though Brown is just a freshman, is pretty impressive if true.

I hope this is more about Carpenter making a big leap from his sophomore to junior year that it is Ross not being worth the ton of money LSU spent on his NIL package. From what I understand, LSU paid Ross starter money, not back up.

I’ll be surprised if Carpenter actually starts against Clemson over Ross and Brown. Tip of the hat to him if he does. He would have beat out two highly ranked five stars.

Every week or so an article pops up somewhere predicting LSU’s big breakout wide receiver this year. One thing thats kind of crazy is at least five different names have been mentioned as our best receiver, most prominently Jayce Brown, Jackson Harris, Tre Wilson, Tre Brown and Winston Watkins.

To make it even crazier, for a school like LSU that has been recruiting and churning out NFL receivers the last twenty years or more, none of the five most mentioned as breakout receivers were not lsu high school signess out of high school. They are all transfers. It’s going to be confusing with two Tre’s and two Brown”s we never saw play before to learn who is who, lol.

Jayce Brown and Jackson Harris are the ones I see mentioned most often as probable starters, although I did see a big article recently crowning Tre Wilson as the jewel of the wr transfer class.

As for the slot, I was watching some video highlights of the group just for something to do. Highlight videos have a way of making everyone look all pro. One thing that caught my eye was the video of Watkins in the slot at Ole Miss and how fast he pops up after every tackle and is sprinting to line back up for the next play.

Kiffin is the master of the hurry up offense and punishes defenses with it. It takes players with discipline to do it, there’s no time to linger on the ground, no time do celebrate and no time to jaw with the defenders.its all about lining up and being ready to go for the next play faster than defense to get set, recognize the offensive formation, and call their defense.

in his highlights, there is no wasted time with Watkins after getting tackled, he’s lining back before they move the chains. I assume thats no accident, that Weis and Kiffin drilled that into him. Watson looks like one of those smaller, kind of fast twitch kids, you see in the slot that can be very hard for nickel backs or safeties to cover. I am guessing he is the guy to beat out to play slot wr for Kiffin with his experience in knowing what Kiffin expects of him and his familiarity with the offense.

On a completely unrelated note, anyone have any idea who is the mix for kick off and punt returns? I saw Harlem Berry mentioned as kick off returner. I would think punt returner comes from the group of wide outs listed above.

Here is link to Watkins highlights at Ole Miss, keep in mind he was a true freshman at the time:

LINK

Thx, I saw this video Zach Nagy posted on X and it struck me how tall Benefield looked on the clip LINK

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Measuring football players in MPH is stupid. Football players never run a mile, and they never run for an hour. The tried and true standards of 40 times and 100 times have served us well for over a century. If you already know a ball player runs a 4.4, what is gained by converting that to MPH? This thread is testament to the fact people don’t know MPH as it relates to football.

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Hey, I was only posting what Kiffin tweeted. I guess Kiffin thinks mph is a more important football metric than you do. Otherwise, why would he post it?

I imagine I am not the first to notice the similarity, but am I the only one who Mason Braun’s jerky batting routine which ends up with him in a bad arse looking batting stance reminds them of Jack Parkman in major league 2? Lol Braun has the Parkman stare too.

If I knew how to post clips of Braun and Parkman doing their batting routine I would. Braun’s routine where hard twerks his lead shoulder a few times is great, you will never confuse him for anyone else.

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Putting standfield back in will weaken a little. He's not a consistent hitter we have better hitters that can play left fiel

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It’s a very small sample size so far. Wasn’t Stanfield our leading hitter against SEC pitching last year? When you add in his speed and fielding ability, I think his starting spot is very secure. It’s a nice problem to have, Simpson probably has more pop in his bat.

I think once Stanfield is fully recovered, Simpson’s primary role will be DH.