re: Ryan Downton says LSU will be in “contempt of court” if they don’t roster the players

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This is my biggest problem with this whole mess. We not only have judges deciding rules/eligibility, we could now have them effectively forcing schools to roster certain players. That’s insane to me.

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The operating assumption is that the coach not thing preventing LSU from rostering the players at this moment is the threat of SEC retaliation.

Think about it this way - the lawsuit is against the NCAA and SEC. The injunction says the NCAA and SEC can’t prevent these players from playing. The SEC and NCAA are associations with individual universities as members.

Imagine a scenario where the SEC told the judge “okay, we’ll allow the players to play.” They say, on paper, that the players are eligible. Then the member institutions get together behind closed doors and say “fine, we can call them eligible, but we all agree not to roster any of them.” That’s effectively no different than making a rule stating that they’re ineligible, and it would violate the court order.

If the SEC or NCAA is able to sidestep that by telling their member schools “fine, they can play but there will be hell to pay later if they do,” that’s the same thing. It defeats the purpose of the injunction. And if LSU, as a member university in the SEC, decides not to roster these players due solely to threat of SEC retaliation, that violates the court order.

If LSU chose not to roster the players due to other factors - talent, off-field issues, whatever - that would be completely different. But nobody believes there’s anything holding LSU back except the SEC right now.

Roster them but do not play them yet.