Are we witnessing a real life, CFB Game of Thrones, play out?

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Are we watching a real life Game of Thrones scenario where everybody is supposedly fighting over NFL players, while the real wars are happening underneath it.

The more I look at this, the less I think this is actually about a couple of guys getting cut from NFL camps and coming back to college.

The NCAA knew the five for five transition was going to create lawsuits. They could have grandfathered the affected players, set a clean transition date, and written future rules. They did not. Now the chaos they helped create strengthens their argument that Congress needs to step in and give college sports a national framework.

The Big Ten seems to be playing a completely different game. Their schools have aggressively used every opening they could find. Indiana, UCLA, and others have pushed the eligibility rules, while the Big Ten wrote its new professional player rule narrowly enough that it did not unnecessarily hurt its own schools. Their priority seems pretty clear, protect the conference nationally and do not voluntarily handicap your own programs.

Then there is the SEC, and I think this is where the actual Game of Thrones stuff starts.

LSU was not the only SEC school looking at these openings. Florida admitted it was talking to players coming out of NFL camps. Ole Miss had conversations with its 2022 guys. Alabama had somebody DeBoer acknowledged they could potentially bring back. Missouri went to court. Texas brought Hutson back after two NFL minicamps. Ole Miss got Chambliss through a Mississippi court.

Then LSU gets Wright and Harris protected by a Louisiana court, Lane goes after them, and suddenly we get one of the most rigid rules and penalty structures imaginable.

I cannot prove why that happened, but I also think pretending the economics inside the SEC have nothing to do with this is naive.

LSU just hired Lane Kiffin and may have the most expensive roster in college football. Texas and Texas A and M are spending insane money. Georgia is Georgia. Florida is getting aggressive again. Meanwhile there are schools in this conference that simply are not going to be able to financially keep up with that group long term.

That means everybody wearing an SEC patch does not necessarily have the same interests anymore.

For twenty years everybody got to share the credit when Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Florida, and Auburn won championships. Now NIL and direct payments are exposing who can actually afford to operate at the very top and who benefits from rules that keep those programs from separating even further.

So maybe the public fight is NFL players, but underneath that you have the NCAA fighting for federal protection, the Big Ten fighting the SEC for control of college football, Sankey fighting to preserve conference authority, smaller SEC programs fighting to prevent an unlimited arms race, and LSU and some of the other major brands increasingly fighting for the freedom to spend their money and use every legal advantage available to them.

This isn't just LSU's 50M roster. LSU fired BK, stole Lane Kiffin from another SEC program along with some of their top players, and we know the rest. Then, they get together at the Governors mansion to discuss HOW TO KEEP DOING THIS. That's what got everyone else's attention, which is why we are seeing the SEC freak out.

I've watched Paul Finebaum for the last couple of days... and this is only relevant for this matter.... apart from his relentless attacks on LSU, all I see is a bunch of has beens on this program. It's boring now. Who cares what Auburn and Alabama fans have to say? You even have Pat McCafee mocking Finebaums takes now, and being very favorable to Kiffin. That's a change from how things were in the past.

That is the part I think people are missing.

Everybody looks like they are fighting the same war.

I am starting to think they are all fighting completely different wars.

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