LS-coup: Tanking the best job on the market
Someone tell President Trump he's hiring a football coach in Louisiana
All around the internet, we’ve seen one unlikely name pop up in college football circles. One that you wouldn’t expect to suddenly wield so much power with no regard for what he’s doing. Of course, we’re talking about Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.
Originally, I saw a lot of people talking about Landry’s role in LSU’s coaching search. A lot of people tossing around statistics on Louisiana’s education rates, economic levels, things like that. People didn’t understand why Landry was suddenly a figure in the Tigers’ search for the next football coach that would revive the program. I was going to write a post for this week about why Landry was here, why it was a part of his job description, and why it ultimately didn’t matter.
And then he opened his mouth.
Brian Kelly simply wasn’t working out at LSU. He didn’t know players’ names. He didn’t maintain a connection with the LSU of the past. He didn’t win at the clip everyone expected of him. We went over why Kelly was fired in the LSU shortlist last week. It was time.
But since then? Things have only gotten worse. Like, catastrophic levels of worse.
This was already going to be a wild coaching search. LSU doesn’t come open very often, and with the boosters and staff aligned this past offseason to go big-time portal shopping, the Tigers are ready to flex their muscles and return to where they think they belong: at the top of the college football landscape. Remember, this is a program that as recently as 2019 won the College Football Playoff and assembled one of the single best rosters in college football history. They’re a powerhouse of a program.
With that LSU shortlist, I proposed a set of five candidates that make sense for the best job in the country. The hot, likely, top candidate of the cycle: Lane Kiffin. Two up-and-coming SEC head coaches reviving programs that don’t historically see success in the league: Eli Drinkwitz and Clark Lea. A hot name on the NFL trails that was a major part of that 2019 puzzle: Joe Brady. The crazy, splashiest move anyone could consider: Dan Lanning. Heck, I even floated Nick Saban coming out of retirement as a possibility!
None of those coaches are likely to even sniff a trip to Baton Rouge unless their current employer - be it a team or ESPN - sends them there on assignment. All because of the wild turns that this coaching search has taken in just over a week.
A murky hiring process
I structured that coaching shortlist based on what I knew about the guy that would be doing the hiring of LSU’s next football coach, athletic director Scott Woodward. And I noted that his leash was short, but he has the entire LSU athletic department trending upwards:
“Woodward will oversee the hiring process. He has a muddy resume on the gridiron, bringing Kelly to LSU and handing Jimbo Fisher his ill-fated Texas A&M contract at his last stop. But he’s worked wonders in other sports, hiring Jay Johnson for the Tiger baseball program and Kim Mulkey in women’s basketball. Both have won national championships.
Still, there is variability here. The university is without a president. Since they are a public school, Gov. Landry is acting in that role, hence his involvement in the process here. And Woodward’s job is hinging on this hire, no matter how successful Johnson and Mulkey have been.” - Griffin Olah, SID Sports, Coaching Shortlist: LSU, Oct. 28, 2025
Gov. Landry obviously wasn’t in on that idea. One day after I released my shortlist, Landry was asked one football-related question at a press conference about SNAP benefits and other, you know, governor-related tasks. It was the one about LSU that broke through the internet.
“And I wanted to tell you something. This is a pattern… I believe that we are going to find a great coach… the board of supervisors are going to come up with a committee and they’re going to find us a coach,” said Landry. “Hell, I’ll let Donald Trump select [LSU’s next head coach] before I let [Woodward] do it.”
As the acting President of the university, it’s within Landry’s rights to relieve Woodward of his duties. That’s not the problem here. The problem is him announcing it in a completely backwards, non-assuming way and kneecapping the current athletic director and hamstringing the Board of Supervisors that are actually supposed to manage the day-to-day operations of the university.
When LSU’s Board of Supervisors Chair Scott Ballard was told that Landry is tasking them, instead of the athletic director, with forming a committee and finding the next LSU head coach, Ballard responded, “No, I didn’t know that.”
Well, who, Gov. Landry, is planning on hiring a coach in the great state of Louisiana? With the government shut down, maybe just give Trump the keys since we’re just unilaterally making decisions during non-related press conferences.
For what it’s worth, Woodward was officially fired the next day from LSU. He has a $7 million buyout on the remainder of his contract. And, to make things more complicated, it was announced interim athletic director Verge Ausberry is leading the coaching search. Confused yet?
A lack of understanding
I’m not going to try to get political here or anything, but politicians have a lot on their plates. Whether they pay attention or not is a different story, but a governor like Landry is supposed to be well-versed in things like economics, education reform, healthcare, government assistance, and other political things. Some may know more about education overall, but college athletics aren’t remotely at the top of the list.
It’s clear that it’s not at the top of Landry’s list of topics either, because I think there’s a fundamental lack of understanding that is driving the issues with the LSU search.
It’s not the politicization of the search that’s an issue for me - we’ve seen many a coaching search taken over by politics and we’ll see many a search in the future play politics. It’s the fact that everything Landry says and does is driving away candidates.
Let’s look at his claims so far. First, his declaring war on Woodward in an unrelated press conference on a throw-away question is a serious problem. It shows that the power in the athletic department is in flux and destroys any appeal of university alignment. That’s a big ding for many top candidates.
It also shows that Landry wants to be involved in this process. That he’s wanting a piece of the LSU pie. And that’s often the case, as LSU’s campus and the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion are only separated by three miles. But this? This is beyond what we’ve seen in the past.
More concerning is Landry’s talk about the job itself. He’s spent plenty of time decrying the state of college football buyouts and their relation to the tax rates of his constituents in Louisiana. That’s a fair stance for a politician to have, no? Except, he’s not understanding how this work.
Landry has posted and talked about Brian Kelly’s buyout ad nauseum. He claimed that the Louisiana taxpayers were on the hook for Kelly’s $54 million buyout. Which is technically true, as long as there isn’t private donations to cover the buyout. Which there is, according to Ballard, who stated that the entire buyout is financed by athletics-specific funds and private donations, with no other budget touched. Landry doubled down, tweeting a copy of Kelly’s contract that says just that - the public only has to pay the buyout if it isn’t financed any other way. Which it is.
Then, Landry went on a tirade against Woodward that likely led to the athletic director’s firing. On the Pat McAfee Show, Landry stated that “there’s a number of bad contracts that seem to have followed Scott Woodward.”
Of course, he’s talking about Kelly’s deal, which objectively looks terrible. But he’s also talking about Jimbo Fisher’s ill-fated Texas A&M contract. You may have noticed in my quote from the LSU Shortlist that I also attributed Fisher’s contract to Woodward. But that’s not correct. Yes, Woodward was the one that lured Fisher away from Florida State and to Bryan-College Station, but he didn’t hand the massive contract to Jimbo. That would be Ross Bjork, who succeeded Woodward at athletic director at Texas A&M and has since moved to the same role at Ohio State. Because it wasn’t the initial contract negotiated by Woodward that locked in the unprecedented buyout - it was the extension negotiated by Bjork.
Political commentator and noted LSU alum James Carville is taking up the fight for Woodward, engaging the services of a lawfirm to file a libel suit against Landry for his treatment of Woodward. He’s mostly concerned about the “reputational damage” to the university, which is valid since Landry just went scorched earth on one of the nation’s top athletic departments, which ranked 17th in last year’s Learfield Director’s Cup, which ranks athletic departments by their overall performance across every sponsored sport.
I don’t know how plugged in Carville is with the LSU boosters at large, and I won’t claim to. But, he’s a big name with presumably a lot of pull. Could this lawsuit fracture the boosters just under one year after they finally got fully organized?
With all of this, Landry has been pulling for a new contract structure for LSU’s next head coach. He’s already said that, once the coach is chosen, Louisiana’s attorney general is going to take a good, hard look at the contract to see if it’s in the state’s best interests. He’s also floating cutting guarantees and performance-based compensation. I think we can all agree that’s not a bad idea, but it’s controversial at the very least.
Coupling that with Landry’s ire at how sports agents work, calling out a conflict of interest between the agent that represents Scott Woodward and Brian Kelly. Landry alleged that it was the same person, which would present a conflict of interest. That’s fundamentally incorrect.
First off, it’s not the same person. Kelly is represented by Trace Armstrong. Woodward’s agent is not public knowledge, but it has been shown that it’s not Armstrong. Second, that’s not how a conflict of interest works. There is no benefit for Woodward to go after only candidates with the same representation he has. He doesn’t get a kickback for hiring another Jimmy Sexton client. Just like we don’t see these issues pop up in the NFL, NBA, MLB, even in the transfer portal. These super-agents like Scott Boras, Rich Paul, Jimmy Sexton and others represent all kinds of athletes and coaches and administrators across all levels of sport. If there was a problem, you would think that there would be an antitrust or other suit, wouldn’t you? Especially when the NCAA is getting sued from every angle?
But, with all that said, Landry has done serious damage to the LSU job. At this point, I’d say all those names I floated earlier in the shortlist are unlikely at best. Because, in the words of Carville, “Who the f*** is going to coach here?”
Seriously, who? You’re getting micromanaged by the governor for crying out loud! There is no president, no athletic director. The boosters and Board of Supervisors are being shoved aside by an elected official. The entire athletic department is in ruins.
Yes, LSU is still a premier spot with tons of talent locally to pull from. But my goodness this is going to be a messy search.
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