A new sports season is getting under way and it has brought another roster crisis to LSU.
The Tigers football team had just started the season last month when head coach Lane Kiffin’s attempt to bring in and potentially utilize a couple of players who had gone to NFL training camps landed LSU in court.
Now it’s Will Wade’s turn as the start of the LSU men’s basketball season looms. Like the football coach the basketball coach is testing the limits of who is and isn’t eligible in the vague and changing world of college athletics.
And the SEC doesn’t like Wade doing it any more than it liked Kiffin doing it.
Wade, who is entering the first season of his second stint at LSU, has been trying to build from the ground up a roster than was empty not that long ago and as recently as last week was insufficient to provide the five players necessary to play a game.
He’s up to 10 players (subject to developments), thanks in part to a group of walk-ons, but there are multiple proven players whose status is in question and has added to the ongoing legal battle between the university and the conference.
The primary player in question is RJ Luis Jr., the 2025 Big East Conference Player of the Year who signed multiple two-way deals with NBA teams. Luis has received a court order preventing, at least temporarily, the SEC from banning him from playing this season.
But Luis is not on Wade’s roster and the coach said this week that the university will follow SEC “protocols,” much as Kiffin did with tight end Dae’Quan Wright and defensive tackle Zxavian Harris, who were never placed on the football roster.
Wade has eyed but mostly left off his roster other players that are drawing the conference’s ire.
In a court filing, the SEC, which last month threatened to kick LSU out of the conference after 93 years, argued that the university has “refused to publicly and definitively state that (Luis)” will not be on the roster even though he has yet to be rostered and presumably Wade’s comment about following protocols means he won’t be without the conference’s OK.
LSU is not the only university in the United States that has found itself in court in relation to trying to add players whose eligibility is murky, but the presence of Kiffin and Wade in the controversy has naturally placed the Tigers’ athletic department front and center.
Wade’s first stint at LSU ended with him rightfully being fired for violating NCAA rules, which, it must be noted, are now defunct.
Both coaches’ most recent employers – N.C. State in Wade’s case and Ole Miss in Kiffin’s – took umbrage at the manner in which the departures took place.
Wade and Kiffin’s status as magnets for controversy is largely self-inflicted, but in the recent roster kurfuffles both coaches have pledged to follow SEC rules and neither has violated that pledge.
The SEC’s long-time arrogant slogan “It just means more,” suggests that competition and winning mean more to the conference and its members than it does to their competitors, though recent history doesn’t consistently support that bluster.
But the efforts of Kiffin and Wade to test just how far the boundaries extend in building championship programs – without crossing those boundaries – should not make them the target of threats or sanctions from the SEC.
It should make them SEC-endorsed models for other conference members.
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