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Texas Congressman calls Lane Kiffin saga 'absolute abomination,' calls for government intervention on conference size

Barkley-Truaxby: Barkley Truax12 hours agoBarkleyTruax

Texas congressman Chip Roy described the current state of college football as “laughable” and a “money grab.” He pointed toward the Lane Kiffin saga at LSU and Ole Miss as a prime example of the issues facing college football today.

Roy, an outspoken conservative running for Texas Attorney General in 2026, takes his position at a time where Congress is soon expected to come to a vote on the SCORE Act. It’s one of the several issues he has with the way college football in particular is heading.

“I mean, why in the hell are we allowing coaches to walk out and be paid not to coach for years? It’s insane,” Roy said on Monday. “I mean, what we just saw unfold with Lane Kiffin is just an absolute abomination. People say, ‘Well, this is the market working, Chip. This is the market forces at play.’ This is not supposed to be a market, not in that classic sense.

“Yes, college sports can compete with the NFL for revenue. Yes, college sports can compete with other entertainment dollars. I get that, but this is not supposed to be NFL lite. But yet, that’s how we’re treating it.”

Kiffin is the new coach at LSU after leading Ole Miss to an 11-1 regular season. He won’t be coaching the Rebels in the College Football Playoff, which is another argument in itself.

At the same time, Roy has taken exception to the way money has begun to rule college sports. He believes revenue dollars have ruined the tradition and rivalries that once made college athletics great, and have created a “crappy playoff structure” and a “crappy system that doesn’t even really work very well.”

“We’re trying to sort of bastardize this whole thing with a band aid on a gunshot wound,” Roy continued. “That’s what we’re doing, and I don’t think it’s sufficient. I think we should have amendments.

“I don’t know what we’re doing with the powers that we have here engaging and interfering with states, but if we’re going to take a big federal step, because the federal court intervened, and we’re going to intervene, well then maybe we should fully intervene. Maybe we should fix the damn mess so that we don’t have 16 teams in the SEC and 17 teams in the ACC, and 19 team in the Big Ten and freaking Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast, in the Atlantic Coast Conference, all because of money.”

Conference realignment over the past 2-3 years has seen all Power Four conferences add new teams to their ranks. The issue? Traditional geographic boundaries once tied conferences togethers for decades, but now schools are regularly traveling across to the country to play their new conference foes.

Teams who were once longtime members of the Pac-12 moved on to the Big Ten, Big 12 and even the ACC due the conference’s failure to secure a competitive television rights deal. This would have garnered programs significantly less revenue if they stayed put. Now, conferences are ballooning to sizes that haven’t been seen before in college football — something Roy believes has ruined the traditions of college football.