ESPN, Inside the SEC’s Tangled Legal Battle With LSU and Lane Kiffin:

As LSU and the SEC found themselves locked in an unprecedented game of legal chicken over coach Lane Kiffin’s plan to roster two former NFL players this season, Kiffin routinely reached out to his friend, attorney Tom Mars, for legal advice.

When Mars urged Kiffin to back down, the LSU coach texted him screenshots of legal opinions from an unlikely source.

ChatGPT.

“Usually, when I would express an opinion about what LSU was doing, Lane would reply with a screenshot from ChatGPT that supported LSU’s position, which was almost always wrong,” Mars said. “Lane ignored most of my unsolicited advice, but I don’t think he’ll be using ChatGPT anymore for legal advice.”

Even though former Ole Miss players Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris prevailed in Louisiana state court and obtained a preliminary injunction that prevented the SEC and NCAA from keeping them off the field this season, LSU ultimately chose to not add them to its roster.

The SEC had threatened to impose stiff penalties to any school that rostered former NFL, NBA or WNBA players, including a fine that equaled 50% of the sport’s annual operating budget and a half-season suspension for the head coach.

The SEC also filed a federal lawsuit against LSU in Alabama — on the same day commissioner Greg Sankey was testifying in state court in Baton Rouge — and later scheduled a vote of its member university presidents to consider booting the Tigers out of the league.

If Kiffin hadn’t backed down, LSU might have been punished severely, perhaps even kicked out of the league, if the SEC prevailed in federal court or a state appeals court.

“Eventually I told him that a guy with a $91 million contract ought to have a top-notch lawyer on speed dial and not be using ChatGPT for legal advice,” Mars said.

It was another bizarre turn of events in a legal showdown that pitted one of the most powerful conferences in college sports against one of its most storied and successful programs on the eve of the 2026 season. …

“One reason I like Lane so much is that neither of us are risk averse, and we’re both willing to take chances others might not take,” Mars said. “But Lane takes it to the next level. Borrowing a line from ‘Star Trek,’ you might say Lane is willing to go where no man has gone before.”

Above the Law, Lane Kiffin Is EXACTLY The Guy Who Uses ChatGPT For Legal Advice:

LSU nearly got themselves kicked out of the SEC in a legal standoff over signing former NFL players to the roster. The SEC’s argument rested, in part, on the claim that LSU had no institutional control over its big money athletic coaches. And now we hear that LSU almost ran itself over the cliff because its head football coach kept taking legal advice from ChatGPT. …

In Kiffin’s defense, as long as he kept the school in state court, ChatGPT was doing just fine. The problem was that the other universities in the SEC were ready to drag this into federal court. But this is the reality of legal tech right now — litigants are armchair quarterbacking their strategy with help from free bots as real lawyers scream into their pillows.

Lane Kiffin may be the greatest possible spokesperson for generative AI. For all its advancements, the technology remains, fundamentally, “Mansplaining as a Service” — a fluent, confident explanation of anything, on demand, with no particular relationship to whether it’s right. Lane Kiffin’s entire career of failing upward is the football corollary of someone texting a chatbot’s legal analysis at an actual lawyer. When Mars says the screenshots Kiffin sent “supported LSU’s position,” it’s a tell. The bot wasn’t parsing the NCAA manual, it took LSU’s self-interested prompt and reverse engineered an answer. …

ChatGPT aside, the fact that LSU had its football coach looking up legal strategy with a chatbot and forwarding it to a lawyer who didn’t even represent the school smacks of “lack of institutional control.” But LSU ultimately gave up on the NFL players so the SEC decided it wasn’t a problem anymore.

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