Happy Wednesday, everyone. The NFL Draft is tomorrow, Lane Kiffin's locker room is apparently a UFC octagon, and a White House committee has opinions about playoff expansion. This sport is a gift.
Let's start in Tuscaloosa, where the wound from that 38-3 Rose Bowl catastrophe clearly has not healed, and former Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson has been kind enough to pour salt in it himself. Simpson went on a podcast — because that's what quarterbacks do now instead of, say, preparing for the NFL Draft — and shared that heading into the Indiana game, he had them all figured out. "From my point of view, I was like, they don't do much," Simpson explained. "They do the same thing every down." He wanted credit, apparently, for diagnosing the defense that then held his offense to 193 total yards, 23 rushing yards, a 3-for-11 third-down rate, and sent him to the sideline with a cracked rib.
Indiana defensive coordinator Bryant Haines saw this and chose violence. He took to social media to call Simpson out, then turned his fire on the Alabama fanbase when they erupted in his mentions. "That's all it took to break your entire fanbase? Wow.. maybe I should've just said 'Boo.'" He signed off with: "Grow up folks. He had a bad take and I said the painful truth. Bounce back better." Somewhere, Bear Bryant's ghost is staring into the middle distance.
The timing is exquisite, because Simpson is currently sitting in the green room for Thursday's draft in Pittsburgh, sweating. ESPN's Peter Schrager said on Wednesday he cannot find a single team "waving up and down" for Simpson, while simultaneously reporting Simpson is "of the belief" he'll be a first-rounder. These two things cannot both be true and yet here we are. Dan Orlovsky is out here making a last-ditch case for Simpson as QB1 of the class, which is extremely Dan Orlovsky of him. The Cardinals and Jets are lurking. The nation watches. Alabama Twitter has checked the injury report approximately 4,000 times today.
Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, Lane Kiffin is doing Lane Kiffin things. A satirical tweet claiming he cancelled LSU's spring game because it conflicted with an Alpha Phi sorority formal went viral this week and the LSU fanbase — a fanbase that once got their sitting governor involved in a football coaching hire — briefly believed every word of it. Which, in fairness, is extremely on-brand for a program that paid a $54 million buyout to fire Brian Kelly, pressured its AD to resign, and then handed Kiffin a $91 million contract while the Louisiana governor texts him updates. The spring game was indeed cancelled — not for Greek life reasons, but because Kiffin doesn't do spring games, citing roster-poaching concerns in the portal era. Reasonable! But also: he reportedly told reporters this week that his team had SIX FIGHTS in a single spring practice session. Six. He said it casually, as a success story, because they had zero fights the next day. Lane Kiffin is managing a $40 million roster like a substitute teacher who's just grateful nobody threw a desk.
And then there's the CFP expansion circus, which has somehow grown to involve the actual United States government. A White House presidential committee is now pushing for a 24-team playoff field, because nothing says "separation of powers" like an executive branch with bracket opinions. The Big Ten wants 24. The SEC wanted 16. They couldn't agree, so the playoff stays at 12 through next year — which Greg Sankey somehow spun as a win for deliberation. Kirby Smart and Josh Heupel have now publicly warmed to 24 teams, which tracks perfectly with the SEC having just moved to a nine-game conference schedule and realizing that three losses might keep you home in December. The SEC will get to 24 teams eventually. They just need everyone to think it was their idea.
It's mid-April. The season doesn't start until September. And yet: a quarterback is in the green room sweating over a podcast take, a new coach is refereeing brawls in Baton Rouge, and the executive branch has entered the playoff format groupchat. The SEC, baby. It never stops.
