Somewhere there's a judge in Louisiana who isn't hooked into a political machine and can't be bought by one—maybe. And that is the judge, should he or she actually exist, who should hear Brian Kelly's lawsuit against his former employers at LSU. To be clear, everyone else should hear it, too. This lawsuit not only has to happen but must be shown live, every day. In a nation that tries daily to ram Wicked: The Final Reckoning and America Hates Talent into the eyes and brains of a helpless populace, Kelly vs. The State Of Louisiana will deliver what we not only deserve but truly crave in our entertainment.
America embraced and celebrated crude villainy well before The Sopranos delivered a prestige version augmented with pathos and prosciutto. We all live in and with a much less complicated but equally crude omnidirectional villainy every day, but even given this moment's high baseline for such things, this case could set a new standard. We have before us a genuinely repellent football coach, a spineless athletic director, a wildly detestable governor, and an angry mob fistfighting each other on the courtroom steps; the one character we have not yet met is the careerist judge who fought to get this gig in the hope that the TV time might boost his or her own future gubernatorial campaign. The only sympathetic character in this cast would be the overwhelmed court reporter shouting, "MY STENO MACHINE IS ON FIRE! MY SHIRT IS ON FIRE! I'M ON FIRE! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" And who wouldn't want that as the final outcome, with the stenographer as an optional addition?
Think of this as the O.J. Trial, only with no actual crime, even less dignity, and much less accomplished legal minds defending their equally reprehensible clients. Even the witnesses could make you retch as they explain Kelly's past coaching stops, the people who hired him, the people who hired other coaches and helped established the buyout as the central goal of coaching aspirations, and the whole deliciously malignant underbelly of the college football industry as part of the discovery process. Imagine the gasps in the courtroom as an expert testifies about Tommy Tuberville's whole thing.
It has to be played this way, because it has played this way from the moment Kelly was hired to restore LSU's glory years. They didn't happen, but the contract he received—$95 million over 10 years—sat in the middle of the table like a steroidal Thanksgiving turkey. It was hard to talk around it, and it was too bloated to be appetizing. Because money is cheap in college football, Kelly was fired after getting hammered after successive losses to Vanderbilt and Texas A&M, with $53 million left on his deal. In this legal action, Kelly is claiming the school, despite announcing his firing in late October and offering him lump sum payments of first $25 million and then $30 million to go away, had not yet formally terminated him until Monday. Per Kelly, this is because LSU is trying to find ways to fire him for cause—maybe for not showing up for work after being fired—and therefore get out of paying him at all. He is suing the school and the state for his money. You can't make this up, but also you don't have to—in Louisiana, our ethical Disneyland, this is just how it goes.
The end result, whatever it is, will see someone undeserving of tens of millions of dollars getting tens of millions of dollars. If the judge could figure out a verdict in which the school pays the $53 million but Kelly doesn't get it, we as a nation would elect that judge God For Life by acclimation. Even if the judge took the money and gave it to DraftKings for safekeeping, we'd still say, "Yeah, I can see that. That seems fair."
Even more ideal would be if the plaintiff, defendants and all the witnesses got jail time for just being GRAs as part of Louisiana's pending and retroactive Making Us Look Less Ridiculous Act of 2026. The money goes to charity, hard time goes to the trial characters—justice for all, for a change.
It won't happen that way, of course, because this is Louisiana, but mostly because this is college football, and American politics playing out through a judicial system afflicted with tragic and profound anal-cranial inversion. But we could heal this country and all its self-inflicted miseries right now if we could get one person with authority and ethical underpinnings to say, "Judgment for the plaintiff, but not THIS plaintiff." If nothing else, the money could all go to that poor, anonymous, smoldering court reporter. That's the story that would deserve a sequel.
