LSU's $162m Football Coaching Gamble
LSU has spent or committed about $162m on Orgeron, Kelly and Kiffin as head coach, with Kiffin now facing Clemson in his season opener.
Louisiana State University has spent or committed roughly $162m on its last three football head coaches, according to a long profile of the school's sporting culture published by The Guardian.
Ed Orgeron, who led LSU to a national championship in 2019, received a $17m buyout when he was fired two years later. A month later LSU signed Lane Kiffin to a $91m deal. Kiffin's first assignment is Clemson, the visitors for LSU's season opener at home on Saturday.
The football spending is only part of the picture. In March, LSU brought back men's basketball coach Will Wade, seven years after he was recorded on an FBI wiretap discussing a recruiting payment, an episode that became a symbol of college sport's old pay-for-play culture. An NCAA investigation later found further alleged recruiting breaches, and LSU fired Wade for cause.
The professor Charles Coates, describing LSU on his arrival in 1893, is quoted in the same piece as finding a campus with barely any organised sport at all.
If LSU's recruiting has already been shaped by a war fought thousands of miles away, that suggests the school's sporting ambitions now reach well beyond conference rivalries and coaching budgets, into questions the university cannot fully control.
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