Would Trump want the heavy responsibility of picking the coach?

Last week, in between preparing his poverty-stricken state for the cutoff of SNAP benefits, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry weighed in on LSU football. That alone would have kept social media buzzing for days. Then he said the magic words and set the internet on fire.

“No, I can tell you right now [LSU athletic director] Scott Woodward is not selecting the next head coach. I’d let Donald Trump select it before I let him do it,” Landry said. He sounded like he was joking, but he dangled the idea more than once, remarking also that Trump would make a good choice because he “loves winners.”

One reason Trump might not want to get into selecting college football coaches is that it could become quite a chore. When Auburn fired coach Hugh Freeze this past weekend, it joined a list that includes LSU, Florida, Penn State, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Colorado State and Arkansas. Even subtracting the blue states, that would be a lot to keep up, and how could he refuse anyone after anointing one’s school’s coach?

Worst of all, what if he picked a loser?

Of course by now there’s an AI video of Coach Trump sporting an LSU jacket and lofting a national championship trophy in the air. Even if no one takes it seriously, the governor’s suggestion captures something about America at the moment when the first serious rip in the social safety net is about to begin. Some people are about to see their medical insurance skyrocket, some may not have food as Thanksgiving approaches, but we’re talking about what coaches get paid.

Landry’s rationale for getting involved in the coaching controversy at LSU was that the people of Louisiana could be on the hook for the $53 million severance, which Woodward negotiated with coach Brian Kelly, who was fired midway through a fourth disappointing season. Legally speaking that’s correct, but the truth is that like all the rest of college sports, Kelly’s severance is guaranteed by wealthy alumni donors.

Like so many Louisiana stories, there is deeper water to this one. Landry has taken a greater role in affairs at LSU because the university’s president and several other top officials have resigned over Landry’s moves to dismantle DEI policy. The governor has also feuded with Woodward, a former political consultant who got his start under the late Gov. Buddy Roemer. In addition to political differences, they’ve feuded over Woodward’s firing of a coach who was a Landry friend.

In his six-year tenure as athletic director at LSU, Woodward hired coaches who won the national men’s baseball and women’s basketball championships, but fired a coach who’d won the national football championship. Landry accused him of a “pattern” of making expensive severance deals, because he also negotiated the record $76 million severance for Coach Jimbo Fisher when he was at Texas A&M, which Fisher later cashed in on.

Woodward might well argue that this amounted to the price of doing business in the increasingly competitive, increasingly commercialized, and, in Louisiana at least, politicized world of college sports. How long it can be sustained at this price point is questionable.

But this isn’t a problem the governors of any of the Southeastern Conference states should be worried about first. It’s worth saying again — the whole expensive, shaky system is being underwritten by high rollers, and generates increasing revenues. Nor would the fans of any SEC school stand for it if they learned a top coaching prospect had slipped away because the athletic director was too stingy with the severance offer. And it’s laughable to think they’d keep a losing coach another year just to save on the severance money.

After Landry blamed Woodward for the cost of firing Kelly and prohibited him from hiring the next LSU coach, he engineered his firing, with a more modest but still livable severance of $6.7 million.

If you’re curious, by the way, under his present contract, Georgia Coach Kirby Smart would collect more than $105 million if he were to be fired. For those who don’t follow the game, relax. That’s not likely to happen soon.