Eleven Votes, One Letter: What Actually Happens at Thursday's SEC Meeting on LSU

By Wednesday morning the picture had sharpened. Pete Thamel reported that while the SEC's presidents and chancellors will meet Thursday with expulsion on the agenda, the expectation is that they are not going to throw LSU out of the league. Nobody is putting a vote count on the record. But the mechanism is now public, and so is the thing the SEC actually wants.

The mechanism is Section 3.1.5 of the SEC constitution and bylaws, which gives the conference broad authority to terminate a membership and does not require it to state grounds. Termination takes a two-thirds vote, which with 16 presidents in the room means 11. The federal complaint the conference filed in Birmingham lists three things it says LSU did: left roster spots open for players with professional contracts, let Lane Kiffin talk publicly about recruiting pros after the members voted 15-0 to ban it, and had a president and athletic director who voted for the ban and then said nothing while their coach undercut it.

Read that list again and notice what it is not. It is not an accusation that LSU played an ineligible player. LSU did not. Kiffin left Dae'Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris off the roster for the Clemson game, and the Tigers won 51-10 without them. The complaint is about intent and control, which is a harder thing to prove and an easier thing to fix.

That is the way out. According to the Yahoo Sports reporting on the internal deliberations, LSU president Wade Rousse can almost certainly head off a termination vote by committing, in writing, that the university will follow the conference's rule on professional players, either in a public statement or in a letter to the SEC's lawyers. The conference held two meetings without LSU in the room, on August 30 and September 5, and the options on the table ran from probation and suspension up through boycott and expulsion. Expulsion is the threat. A letter is the price.

So why go this far over two players? One president told Yahoo that it is time for everyone to follow SEC rules, and that is the real story. The conference is building a governance structure that does not depend on the NCAA, and it wants to establish, before that structure is formalized, that a member cannot go to a state court to get around a rule the members passed. If LSU can, so can everyone, and the SEC's rules mean nothing. This is a test case, and LSU happened to be the school that volunteered.

What to watch Thursday: whether Rousse's letter arrives before the meeting, whether the presidents vote on something short of termination, such as a fine or loss of voting rights, to make the point without the cost, and whether Kiffin says anything at all. The SEC's filing quoted his last remark. He knows they are listening.

One more detail from the reporting that should not be lost. The conference has reportedly let ACC contacts know that a vacancy could open, and North Carolina's name came up as the most attractive replacement. That may be leverage rather than a plan. But it is the kind of leverage a conference only uses when it has decided the outcome matters more than the friendship.