Happy May, everyone. The NFL Draft just ended, the nine-game SEC schedule just dropped, Lane Kiffin just finished vacuuming the entire transfer portal into Baton Rouge with a $40 million Shop-Vac, and the conference hasn't won a national title in over three years. Everything is fine. Let's go.
First, the draft. The SEC set an all-time record with 87 selections — breaking its own record of 79 from last year — and somehow, someway, this still feels like a consolation prize. Because Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza went first overall. Ohio State put four players in the top eleven picks. The Big Ten has now won three straight national titles from three different programs. But sure, SEC fans, go ahead and chant about the depth picks. Wave that flag. Tell the man who just swept your girlfriend that his car has higher mileage. The SEC's own analysts are on record saying the conference has been "under-performing relative to its talent level," and yet here we are, minting participation trophies out of seventh-round picks from Missouri. Alabama and Texas A&M tied for the conference lead with 10 selections each. Texas A&M also scored three points in a playoff game this year. Make it make sense.
But the real story, as it has been since approximately October, is Lane Kiffin doing Lane Kiffin things at a new address. The man left Ole Miss mid-playoff run — genuinely abandoned an 11-1 team in the middle of a College Football Playoff berth he helped build — hopped a jet to Baton Rouge, and proceeded to sign 42 transfer portal players, shattering LSU's previous record of 18. Eighteen. Kiffin more than doubled it. The roster is projected to cost over $40 million. Ten of fourteen personnel staffers surveyed named LSU the top spender in the sport. They also reportedly offered one quarterback $3.5 million just for a visit, only for him to bounce to Tennessee anyway, at which point Kiffin personally flew to close the deal on the next guy. This is a football program. It just does not look like one anymore.
And naturally, the College Sports Commission — college football's brand-new sheriff, fresh badge, no bullets — opened its very first formal investigation into LSU over allegedly unreported NIL activity. First investigation. Ever. Of all the programs in America. LSU. Lane Kiffin, in his first season. Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
Meanwhile, Ole Miss is still picking up the pieces. Former Kiffin starter Trinidad Chambliss spent February in an actual Mississippi courthouse fighting the NCAA for a sixth year of eligibility, and Kiffin — from his new LSU perch — posted "Only in the Sip" on X after a video surfaced of Chambliss's Ole Miss quarterback coach being asked by the presiding judge to please talk slower. That post was later deleted. Some things are too on-brand even for Lane Kiffin.
Elsewhere in the conference's increasingly unhinged offseason: the Big Ten now has eleven programs ranked in the top 25 of 2027 recruiting classes. The SEC, which invented the phrase "It just means more," has one team in the top five. A five-star edge rusher chose Texas Tech over LSU and South Carolina. Kansas State stole a kid from Snellville, Georgia — Snellville — over Auburn and Georgia. The nine-game SEC schedule drops this fall and everyone is pretending it's a gift when it is, in fact, eleven months of stress ulcers wearing a bow.
Eighty-seven draft picks, one ongoing investigation, forty-two portal signees, and a deleted tweet. SEC football, baby. It just means more. Whatever that means now.
