Paul Finebaum says LSU chaos may ‘hurt’ its chances to get Lane Kiffin
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Paul Finebaum was a guest on The Matt Barrie Show podcast on Sunday to talk about Week 10 of the college football season.
But the ESPN college football analyst was also there to talk about a team that didn’t even play in Week 10. Yes, it was LSU, which fired head coach Brian Kelly a week earlier and has spent the past week dealing with every kind of distraction you could dream of, including heavy criticism from Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry.
LSU also fired athletic director Scott Woodward during its week to forget, after Landry had lashed out at Woodward and proclaimed that Woodward wouldn’t be the one to hire Kelly’s replacement. It was an exhausting week in Baton Rouge, and LSU didn’t even have a game to get ready for on Saturday.
Finebaum weighed in on the saga at LSU, and he believes all the distractions could ultimately hurt the program’s chances to hire a big-name replacement for Kelly.
“The problem with the governor (of Louisiana) is that he just became a caricature of Louisiana governors, and that’s hard to do by the way, if you understand the history of that state,” Finebaum said. “If you’re Lane Kiffin or somebody else, you’re saying, do I want to deal with that?”
Finebaum believes LSU might have really shot itself in the foot.
“LSU went from the best job in the country to behind a couple of other ones,” he said. “It’s still a great job, but particularly for somebody like Lane Kiffin, I think they were hurt.”
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
