The Southeastern Conference filed papers in federal court detailing its plan to expel Louisiana State University from the conference for naming pro players to its football roster, a move that poses a serious institutional threat in modern college sports.
The SEC’s presidents are expected to vote on LSU’s status Thursday, September 10. A two-thirds vote of the conference’s presidents is required to terminate a school’s membership.
LSU provoked the conference by practicing with players who signed professional contracts and attended NFL training camps before attempting to return to college eligibility, a move that no college has done before. This follows a Louisiana state court ruling that opened a path for dozens of athletes to reclaim a fifth season of eligibility.
At the root of that ruling is a gap in the NCAA’s own rulebook. The association changed its eligibility policy this summer to grant athletes five seasons of competition within a five-year window, up from four, but that reform didn’t extend to athletes from the Class of 2022, who had already exhausted their four-year eligibility before the new rule took effect.
That timing quirk, tied specifically to players who began their college careers during the COVID-era eligibility changes, is what opened the door for more than 300 athletes to file over 60 lawsuits seeking an extra year. Several athletes had already signed pro contracts without knowing the rules were about to change.
Internal conversations among SEC school leaders reportedly go beyond the lawsuit itself, with options including boycotting games against LSU and placing the program on probation.
LSU football head coach Lane Kiffin’s own public comments, including musing about what his roster would look like “if we had pro players” in the middle of his season opener, have become part of the SEC’s argument that the university lacks institutional control over its athletic department.
Camille Ferguson, a first-year LSU law student and fourth-generation Tiger, described a campus where even the people trained to pick apart the legal argument are, in practice, rooting for their own team to win it. In her law school classes, professors spend class time on the mechanics of the dispute — parsing NCAA wording, debating what technically counts as “professional” status — but rarely land on the position that LSU overstepped.
“Pretty much everyone’s defending it,” Ferguson said of LSU recruiting pro-players. “I haven’t heard anyone say, ‘Oh, they probably shouldn’t have done that.’”
The problem, in her view, traces back to the NCAA itself. If the association didn’t want schools testing the edges of its eligibility rules, she said, it should have written them more precisely in the first place.
“If [the NCAA] wanted to get specific with who could come back from the NFL, then they should be more specific in their guidelines,” Ferguson said.
Still, she doesn’t think the dispute helps LSU’s image nationally, regardless of how the vote goes.
“To everyone else it looks like LSU is playing dirty, which I don’t think is necessarily the right word,” she said. “I think it’s more like they’re playing messy.”
The fallout, she predicted, will outlast any single ruling.
“They’ve been put in a tough situation,” Ferguson said. “If [LSU] gets to keep the players, put them on the roster, use them in a game, the ESPN headline is going to be ‘LSU beats Ole Miss,’ and Ole Miss is going to say, ‘Well, they have NFL players.’”
Even a resolution in court won’t appease the people in the stands.
“I don’t think it’s going to be settled between fans because I think that there’s going to be grievances, especially in the SEC,” Ferguson added.
The legal risk cuts both ways, according to one antitrust expert.
Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business who has advised state attorneys general in NCAA antitrust litigation, said the SEC’s push to enforce its eligibility rule carries real legal exposure of its own, not just for LSU.
“There is a very strong argument that the NCAA’s rules about eligibility violate federal antitrust law,” Edelman said, “because the NCAA is made up of schools with substantial market power over the college sports industry, and the eligibility rules exclude a class of athlete from competing in college sports as a mechanism for limiting competition between member schools.”
A conference-level version of the rule is legally murkier than an NCAA-wide one, in part because it’s unclear whether SEC schools alone hold enough market power to violate antitrust law, Edelman explained.
But that calculus changes if other conferences adopted similar rules around the same time.
Back in August, within 48 hours of the initial LSU-signing controversy breaking, the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC all adopted bans on rostering athletes who signed pro contracts, appeared on a professional roster, or declared for a draft without withdrawing.
“If the SEC rule is just an SEC rule, but is shared by other conferences, and was even implicitly agreed to amongst various conferences, then perhaps an argument could be made that the rule is actually nationwide... which further complicates the situation,” Edelman said.
LSU’s strongest defense, if the case proceeds, would likely be to argue the underlying eligibility rule itself is illegal under federal antitrust law, and Edelman believes the SEC has real incentive to avoid that fight.
“The SEC runs a very serious risk in bringing litigation,” he said. “The SEC may very well find itself in the legal position of needing to defend itself for an antitrust violation that was not even subject to scrutiny before then.”
A ruling against the eligibility rule, he added, would ripple well beyond this single case.
“It would open up a Pandora’s box, where athletes excluded, relying on that decision, would almost certainly sue the NCAA for antitrust violations,” Edelman said. “As well as would invite discovery as to the question of whether the SEC agreed to these rules with other conferences, or truly implemented them independently.”
A conference removing a member school entirely is not unprecedented. A decade ago, the NCAA banned Southern Methodist University for a year over pay-for-play violations, a case Edelman examined in a 2014 law review article and has argued may itself have violated antitrust law.
More recently, the Big 12 sued Texas Tech in June to enforce its own rules against quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who was ruled permanently ineligible after admitting to placing thousands of dollars in wagers on college and pro sports. Sorsby withdrew his case rather than fight the league in court, and the Big 12 dropped its suit, handling the matter internally. Even still, it’s a case the SEC has reportedly cited internally as a partial roadmap for its approach to LSU.
Enforcement is further complicated by a legal protection unique to public universities. Of the SEC’s 15 non-LSU members, only Vanderbilt, a private institution, lacks Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity, which protects state universities from being sued in federal court by individuals. How that immunity factors into a conference’s ability to sue or discipline one of its own public member schools remains an open legal question, one that would apply just as easily to a future dispute in the Big Ten, Big 12 or ACC as it does to the SEC today.
As for the Big Ten’s position? No comment beyond their August statement.
When asked directly whether the conference is reconsidering or adjusting its own pro-player ban in light of the SEC-LSU fight, Paul Kennedy, the vice president of sports communications for the Big Ten Conference, said the conference has “nothing to add at this time” beyond its Aug. 25 statement. That statement announced the unanimous adoption of the rule barring players who signed a professional contract, appeared on a pro roster, or declared for the draft without withdrawing from maintaining college eligibility. The conference added that “any discussions about policy adjustments will be handled internally.”
That non-answer is itself informative. Every Big Ten athletic department approved the same category of rule the SEC is now trying to enforce against LSU by legal force, but the conference isn’t yet saying what it would actually do if one of its own members tried what LSU is attempting.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day has already said he wants a conference-wide roster lock-in date separate from the pro-contract ban itself to prevent exactly this kind of late-summer roster maneuvering, a conversation that, if it happens, would directly affect roster planning for every Big Ten program.
A concurrent state court hearing in Baton Rouge remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the College Football Playoff’s leadership is reportedly considering its own eligibility rule barring players who previously signed pro contracts, a policy that, if adopted, would apply across every conference.
LSU and LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry did not respond to requests for an interview.