Buddy Blog : The Curse Of LSU's Ill-Gotten Gain, While Dawn Breaks Over The Swamp

Why Florida Hiring Sumrall Feels “Right” — But LSU Employing Kiffin Does Not.

By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com 

There’s a particular kind of morning coming that only Gator faithful know — the one where the humidity hangs sweet, the calendar finally says football, and the doldrums that lingered too long start burning off like fog over Lake Alice. Another dawning. Another chance. And for those of us who’ve bled orange and blue through the lean years, this one tastes different.

Give the University of Florida its due for doing this the right way — no shortcuts, no back-alley bargains, just steady hands making steady choices. 

You won’t hear me thumping a pulpit about it, because plenty of good programs have stumbled and plenty of proud ones have paid the price. But when your school gets it right, you tip the cap, pour a second cup of coffee, and say thank you.

Then along comes Jon Sumrall, still new to the neighborhood, sitting across from Paul Finebaum and sounding like a man who likes what he sees. He’s happy with his quarterbacks. Aaron Philo’s the starter — earned it — but don’t sleep on Tramell Jones, who Sumrall says has taken a huge leap. And here’s the kicker for a portal-crazed era: Sumrall doesn’t plan to add anybody else. He’ll dance with the ones who brung him.

For a fan base that’s waited on mornings like this seemingly forever, that’s more than a depth chart. That’s a sunrise.

Not to go all Charles Stanley on you — though I do love his sermons — but have you ever noticed how the most perfectly orchestrated plan, the one everybody swears is a lock, has a funny habit of blowing up in the architect’s face?

The Bible has a name for it: Ill-gotten gain. Proverbs puts it plainly

 — “Ill-gotten treasures have no lasting value, but righteousness delivers from death.” Proverbs 10:2 goes further, warning that the paths of “all who go after ill-gotten gain” end up taking the life right out of the one who grabbed it. Jeremiah talks about houses “full of deceitful gain.” None of that is subtle. The stuff you get by cutting a shady corner has a way of costing you more than it ever paid.

I bring this up because of what’s unfolding right now with Lane Kiffin and LSU — and because it drags me straight back to a story I lived through more than half a century ago, when Florida pulled off its own version of a “perfect” plan that came apart at the seams.

A Football That Nobody Wanted

Here’s the part most Gator fans don’t know. After the 1969 season — Ray Graves’ greatest, a 9-1-1 team anchored by the “Super Sophs” of John Reaves and Carlos Alvarez that capped it off by upsetting SEC champion Tennessee 14-13 in the Gator Bowl — Graves stepped “up” as head coach to become full-time athletic director. Tennessee’s Doug Dickey, a former Gator quarterback, was hired five days later to replace him. Most of us see now it was somewhat of a prearranged plan.

It looked tidy on paper. It wasn’t. UF president Stephen C. O’Connell — a Florida alum, former state Supreme Court justice and undefeated boxing team captain who’d taken over the university in 1968 — had reportedly been talking on the sly to Dickey about the job since that summer, before Florida’s best season in school history was even finished. 

Confidentially, Graves had all but agreed to step aside, then watched his Gators go 9-1-1 and,  understandably, wanted to keep coaching the team he’d built. Didn’t matter. The fix, such as it was, had already been arranged. 

Many of those Super Sophs — Alvarez among them — thought the job should have gone to beloved defensive coordinator Gene Ellenson instead, and some players felt betrayed.

I was close to that story, in a strange, almost accidental way. My friend Mac Steen, a tackle and captain of that 1969 team, and I had co-written a six-part series that ran in papers around the state called “From the Fishbowl to the Gator Bowl.” 

A season after the coaching switch went through, when Dickey’s reign began to misfire, O’Connell showed up at Steen’s apartment in the wee hours of early morning  — distraught, disheveled, carrying an autographed football from that 1969 team that had been gifted to him. He wanted to give it back. He told Steen he didn’t feel he’d earned it. 

He didn’t use the phrase “ill-gotten gain,” but clearly that’s exactly what he was feeling. Steen said it was one of the most pitiful scenes he’d ever witnessed — a university president standing in a doorway at 5 a.m., trying to hand off a football like it was contraband.

The Man Who Never Talked to Reporters

In the spring of 1970, I had found myself at a sportswriters’ seminar in Austin, Texas, one of maybe 20 writers in the room with Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director — a man who ran the organization from 1951 to 1987 with an iron fist and almost never spoke to the press directly.

For reasons I still can’t fully explain, he had taken an interest in me and we sat at the same lunch table almost daily for a week. When I asked him for a quote on the Graves-to-Dickey maneuver and whether it smelled like the kind of conduct the NCAA rulebook was supposed to police, he didn’t answer. He just handed me the rulebook, pointed me to a passage on ethical conduct, and asked what I thought. I told him honestly I didn’t know. He said he’d look into it.

He did. And when I later reported, with a letter from Byers in hand, that Florida was under investigation, O’Connell stood in front of the media and called me a liar. He ate those words soon enough.

I’m not dredging this up to settle an old score. I’m dredging it up because it’s the same lesson, every time: The moment a man convinces himself his plan is also God’s plan, he’s usually about to find out it was just his plan, dressed up. 

Doug Dickey was a good coach and a fine man who’d already won SEC titles at Tennessee. But his strict, hardass coaching style was in conflict with a team that had just experienced Camelot.

Whatever joy that had been gifted to Gator Nation had been robbed  from them.

None of that saved the deal from being contrived in a way that poisoned it before it started, and it showed — Dickey never got Florida over the SEC championship hump in nine seasons, going 58-43-2 before he was let go.

Kiffin’s Bayou Bargain

Fast-forward to now. Brian Kelly arrived at LSU with a $100 million contract and a mandate to win big. Four seasons and a $54 million buyout later, LSU fired him the day after a 49-25 home humiliation to Texas A&M. That opened the door for Lane Kiffin, who abandoned an Ole Miss team ranked No. 6 in the country — two days after beating Mississippi State, on the eve of a playoff run he’d built — to fly to Baton Rouge and sign a seven-year, roughly $91 million deal. Florida wanted him too, and reportedly offered similar money, but Kiffin chose LSU. 

It looked to a lot of people like the smartest man in the room had once again out-maneuvered everybody.

Then came this week. Kiffin and LSU allegedly went hunting for former NFL players — guys already on NFL rosters or fresh off them — to bring a lawsuit in a friendly Louisiana courtroom arguing they deserved a bonus year of college eligibility, a case that wasn’t filed in Baton Rouge by accident. A judge bought it. LSU signed three of those players. 

It looked, for about a week, like the loophole of the decade. Then it collapsed. SEC presidents — LSU’s own included — voted 16-0 in an emergency meeting to ban former pro athletes from league competition, wiping out Kiffin’s newly signed roster additions days before the season even kicked off. LSU’s administration didn’t vote that way to spite its own coach. It voted that way because it had to, to protect the school from the penalties Kiffin’s cleverness had exposed it. And it’s still unresolved as judges keep popping up like whackamoles.

Add in the Vanity Fair comments about recruiting in Oxford versus Baton Rouge that forced an apology, the Ole Miss lawsuit over transferring linemen and the reported FBI sweep for bugs at the Ole Miss facility after his exit, and you’ve got a program that looks less like it landed a coup and more like it’s still cleaning up after one.

Sound familiar? A well-orchestrated plan, celebrated as genius the moment it worked, undone by the very cleverness that made it work in the first place.

Sumrall’s Quiet Fit

Compare that to how Florida landed its coach. The Gators chased Kiffin hard, lost him to LSU, and turned to their second choice — Tulane’s Jon Sumrall, a 43-year-old who’d gone 43-12 as a head coach and led the Green Wave to back-to-back conference title games. Sumrall himself said it plainly when he took the job: Florida didn’t just need to pick him — he and his wife sat down and chose Florida too. 

No secret handshake, no midnight football to hand back, no courtroom loophole. Just a program that didn’t get its first pick and still ended up, by most accounts so far, with a coach who fits. 

The New York Times went so far as to call Sumrall the best thing to happen to Florida football in two decades.

That’s the difference between something earned and something engineered. 

Ray Graves earned his 1969 season and then had it taken from him by men who thought their scheme was righteousness. Doug Dickey inherited a program poisoned before his first practice. Lane Kiffin inherited a program that just got its cleverest maneuver of the year that may have been stripped away by a unanimous vote of its own bosses. We’ll wait and see how the wheels of justice grind.

Jon Sumrall inherited a program that simply said: We want you, and it turns out he wanted it back.

Proverbs had it right the first time. Ill-gotten gain has no lasting value. Turns out that’s as true in a courtroom in Baton Rouge as it was in a doorway in Gainesville, at three in the morning, with a football nobody wanted to hold.