La. Gov. Jeff Landry on role in LSU search: ‘Don’t hate the player, hate the game’
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Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said in a letter published Wednesday that he was “pulled into” LSU‘s recent head coaching search.
Landry took aim at a college football calendar he called senseless and said the “compressed timeline” associated with the recruiting calendar forces teams to make brazen decisions when it comes to hiring and firing coaches. Landry was critical of LSU’s decision to pay Brian Kelly a large buyout, and he was subsequently criticized for taking a more active role in the coaching search that followed.
He addressed that criticism in Wednesday’s letter.
“To those critical of LSU’s coaching search and my role in it, I say: don’t hate the player, hate the game! We did what we had to,” he wrote.
Beyond addressing the LSU search, Landry called on college sports to “bring common sense” back into the fold to address what he said is a lacking business model that is losing “many billions each year,” which he says will eventually impact taxpayers.
Landry then called on President Donald Trump to “urge” Congress to pass targeted legislation aimed at fixing college football. He said only Washington has the authority to deliver the changes a “broken” college football system needs.
Two key points: Landry said college football needs a “centralized” governance entity that provides basic oversight while still preserving “conference structure,” and he said the FBS needs to unify media rights.
From Landry’s letter:
Like every other major sport, college football needs centralized governance, that provides basic oversight, but that still preserves our conference structure, because those conferences and rivalries are sacred.
This would allow us to create one national standard to protect student-athletes. The governance would set basic rules: decide when players sign, when they can transfer, how coaches move, and set spending caps, so schools aren’t spending themselves into insolvency.
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Finally, we need to address revenue, by applying commonsense business practices. Negotiate media rights with one voice. Unifying these rights would give the sport the bargaining power it needs, just like the NFL and NBA have. Right now, college football delivers roughly twice the audience of the NBA but pulls in only about half the media revenue – the sport is ‘under‑earning.’ That centralization would create a multiplier of revenue that would then be distributed proportionally (not equally) across conferences.
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
