Happy Wednesday, everyone. The offseason rolls on, the portal has temporarily closed, spring games have been played, and absolutely nobody has calmed down. Let's get into it.
We begin in Tuscaloosa, where Kalen DeBoer hosted A-Day a couple of weeks ago and decided the most important thing he could do was make sure no one actually saw it. Alabama didn't air the spring game anywhere — a trend that has apparently become fashionable in college football for coaches who are, let's say, protective of their work — and then, per AL.com's Joseph Goodman, DeBoer's staff corralled the entire media contingent into the north end zone recruiting room like they were quarantining a disease. Stats from the game? Classified. Access to the field? Negative. Goodman, who did not take this well, wrote that the reporters "looked like dorky rats in a cage" and that if Alabama were "as tough on the field as it was with the press trying to cover this team," things might be different. Brutal. Accurate. Redshirt freshman Keelon Russell apparently had a fine day — 21-of-33, four touchdowns — while starter-in-waiting Austin Mack was, as DeBoer delicately phrased it, "dinged up a little bit." Transfer wideout Noah Rogers got carted off. DeBoer told everyone not to overreact. The Alabama fanbase has already fully overreacted. The cycle continues.
Meanwhile, down in Baton Rouge, Lane Kiffin is doing Lane Kiffin things, which in 2026 means spending approximately the GDP of a small nation on a quarterback who is currently on crutches. LSU invested a reported $5 million to pry Sam Leavitt away from Arizona State, and Leavitt promptly had a screw removed from his surgically repaired right foot this spring, will miss the rest of spring practice, and is, per Kiffin, absolutely fine and this was all completely expected. "None of this is a surprise," Kiffin said. Sure. The man spent five million dollars on a guy whose foot he allegedly knew was going to be reconstructed piece-by-piece through spring. To be fair, the portal drama getting Leavitt to LSU was unhinged enough to deserve its own Netflix doc — at one point, news broke that Kiffin was sniffing around a different quarterback while Leavitt's family was literally sitting courtside at an LSU basketball game with him, and the Leavitt camp reportedly walked out of dinner. They came back. Five million dollars is a compelling reason to come back to dinner.
But perhaps the richest subplot of Kiffin's first LSU spring is his complete and total inability to say the words "Ole Miss" or "Trinidad Chambliss." Kiffin tried to comfort fans about Leavitt's absence by pointing to the fact that his previous starting quarterback also didn't arrive until summer — except he couldn't bring himself to name the school or the player. He just said "the previous place we were at" and "the guy." We're watching a man emotionally process a breakup in real time at a podium. The LSU-Ole Miss game this fall is going to be unhinged. I cannot wait.
Somewhere in Dallas this week, the College Football Playoff governance committee is having its annual spring meetings, and the main topic is what it's always been: how many teams should be in the bracket before the SEC commissioner storms out. The White House — yes, that White House — has reportedly thrown its weight behind a 24-team playoff via a 14-person presidential "media" committee. "We asked the government for help with NIL, and now they're involved in the playoff," one CFP committee member said, with energy that can only be described as "person who has made a terrible mistake." The SEC prefers 16 teams, the Big Ten wants 24, they couldn't agree for 2026, so the 12-team format is locked in for another season. The SEC went from having five teams in the last playoff to zero championship game appearances and zero titles since 2022, and their response is to want fewer teams. Confidence or delusion? The conference swears it's confidence.
Finally, and I say this with love for the state of Texas: neither Texas nor Texas A&M signed a single one of the top five in-state prospects in the 2026 recruiting class. Texas Tech, Houston, Oregon, and USC divided them up like a yard sale. The two richest programs in one of the most talent-rich states in the country, and they're getting outrecruited by Lubbock. "It Just Means More" — unless you're trying to keep kids in their own backyard, apparently, in which case it means approximately nothing.
