Happy Mother's Day, and welcome back to the SEC, where the sport has fully come unglued in the most entertaining ways possible.
Let's start with Brian Kelly, because honestly, how could we not. The man went 34-14 at LSU, never sniffed the College Football Playoff, got fired mid-season last October, walked away with a reported $54 million buyout, and has now spent the last six months doing what any 64-year-old football lifer does with sudden free time: chatting with an AI. Specifically, Claude. The chatbot. Powered by Anthropic. Which is — and I cannot stress this enough — the AI that is writing this very sentence.
Kelly told USA Today this week that "every day, I'm trying to do my due diligence using Claude and AI, asking questions to build some of those answers that I think can be helpful for me as I get in front of an athletic director." He also offered the definitive hot take of the offseason, claiming Claude "predicts outside the lines" while ChatGPT "runs straight up the middle." Sir, that is coachspeak applied to large language models, and it somehow works, and I hate it. OutKick joked he needs AI to pick his tie. Social media workshopped his 2 a.m. prompts. A 2026 landing spot looks off the table. The man is burning through his buyout on premium subscriptions and we are all watching.
Meanwhile, the guy who replaced Kelly in Baton Rouge — Lane Kiffin, self-proclaimed Portal King — has apparently decided that the cure for everything is money. Obscene, face-melting amounts of money. Joel Klatt called LSU's roster "one of, if not the most expensive in the sport." On3 reported they originally budgeted $25–30 million before boosters said "why not win in Year 1?" and apparently wrote additional checks. David Pollack went on his platform and said the real number is sixty million dollars. As in $60,000,000. For a college football roster. The centerpiece of this monument to excess is Sam Leavitt, the former Arizona State quarterback, whom LSU reportedly signed after outlasting Tennessee in a bidding war worth somewhere between $5 and $6 million. Leavitt is currently recovering from a foot injury and has not practiced. The LSU donor quoted by On3 seems unbothered. "Why not win in Year 1?" is a sentence that has historically preceded some spectacular collapses, but sure, roll the dice.
And threading through all of it like a man who refuses to enjoy anything is Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, who remains the lone power-conference holdout against expanding the CFP to 24 teams. The ACC supports it. The Big 12 supports it. The coaches' association supports it. Paul Finebaum called the 24-team idea "utterly ridiculous," which means he and Sankey agree on something, which feels like a sign of the apocalypse. Sankey wants 16. The Big Ten wants 24. They have until December 1 to work it out, which means six more months of takes, podcasts, and presidential committee memos.
Also, five-star running back David Gabriel Georges is down to Georgia, Ohio State, Ole Miss, and Tennessee, so four different fanbases are absolutely cooked online today about a high schooler. God bless this sport.
