Lane Kiffin's NFL transfer portal brings spineless leaders to life | Opinion

There’s an old joke in the media biz.

In the joke, a disaster strikes, or a major news event happens, and a reporter hollers, Alert the media!

Buddy, you are the media, so stop hollering and start doing your job.

For the past several years, university chancellors and presidents have been like that reporter, watching college sports burn around them and hollering they need someone to save College Sports Inc. from eating itself whole.

Hey, chuckleheads, the joke’s on you.

Nobody inside the college sports enterprise persistently does less with more power than chancellors and presidents.

The SEC wanted unity. LSU chose to abstain, maintain renegade status

Nick Saban gets time machine, Lane Kiffin scores new team, Paul Finebaum gets podcast

While university muckety-mucks begged someone, anyone — but, especially, Congress — to save them from burning themselves at the stake, they ignored the truth that they’re the ones with the most authority to address college sports’ issues.  

Finally, it reached a boiling point. Texas Tech and LSU flouted norms so egregiously this year that presidents and chancellors across the land woke up and realized nobody is coming to save them from abdicating their responsibilities.

Mercifully, something good could come of Texas Tech’s embrace of a gambling addict and Lane Kiffin’s NFL dumpster diving: A “Fix It Yourself” era of college sports is showing signs of life.

You can’t totally fault Kiffin (well, you can, but save your energy) for being exactly who he’s repeatedly proven to be.  

That’s someone with a loose grip on ethics, someone who repeatedly plants his flag at the vanguard of unsavoriness, someone who’ll take a mile if you give him an inch.

If another coach might think about bending or breaking a rule or ignoring conventional ethics, Kiffin will race to beat them to the starting line.

Kiffin used that rationale to justify opening LSU’s door to players who’d been cut from NFL rosters. If Kiffin gets his way, Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris will join his roster as NFL castoffs turned fifth-year seniors.

Leave it to Kiffin to embrace the NFL transfer portal.

(Will Wade could make Kiffin look like a novice, but that’s another kettle of fish.)

Truth is, Kiffin doesn’t give a hoot about norms or rules, and he’s also not the only coach looking to add pros to the roster. Never mind raiding the NFL’s waiver wire is a slap in the face of college players who’ve been in the program practicing all offseason.

Kiffin figured these NFL retreads would spruce up his depth chart, and a state judge gave the OK for their return to college ball. That’s the only green light Lane needed to see, and who was going to stop him? Certainly not the puppets in LSU’s C-suites.

Left to their own devices, university presidents and chancellors are spineless, but when an issue such as this unites them across the conference, an opportunity for self-governance emerges.

Following the Big Ten’s lead, the SEC’s membership voted in a penalty structure that would include coaching suspensions and significant institutional fines if an institution plays ex-pros from leagues like the NFL or NBA.

A lawyer will see this penalty structure cascading down from Power Four conferences as lawsuit fodder, but I see an attempt, at least, at a solution. A fix-it-ourselves mentality beats begging big government for a bailout that hasn’t materialized after several years of lobbying.

Will this self-governance maneuver succeed? Don’t know. Stay tuned to CourtTV.

Worth a shot, anyway.

Already, a conference’s presidents and chancellors showed some teeth once before this year.

The Big 12 presidents and chancellors muscled up and brought Cody Campbell University (the institution formerly known as Texas Tech) to heel, sinking the Red Raiders‘ plans to play Sorsby. After Sorsby’s gambling activity got exposed, he admitted to being a sports gambling addict who trampled NCAA’s black-and-white wagering rules for years. He bet on college football, including bets involving his own team.

A Texas judge nonetheless ruled Sorsby could play, despite the NCAA saying otherwise. Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec joined a pitiful PR campaign to try to grease the wheels for Sorsby’s return. Remember, at the individual level, presidents and chancellors tend to be feckless, and too meek to apply checks on their coaches and booster class.

Banded together, though, they’ve got more courage, and the Big 12 united to deploy a series of governance and legal moves to scupper the Sorsby comeback.  

Now, throughout Power Four conferences, presidents and chancellors are coming together to erect hurdles in the way of coaches adding NFL castoffs to NCAA rosters.

It took ethical bankruptcy at Texas Tech and LSU to spur action, but school officials who spent years wasting their clout finally decided to get off their soapbox and join the fight.

Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lane Kiffin’s NFL transfer portal brings spineless leaders to life | Opinion