LSU won in court, then folded like a table in a Shreveport Food City parking lot.

A Louisiana judge cleared Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris to return from NFL camps and join LSU. Lane Kiffin won the injunction. LSU still left both off the Clemson roster, submitted 103 names and kept two spots open.

Then LSU beat Clemson 51–10. The Tigers gained 644 yards, allowed 145, and the two empty chairs were still sitting there afterward.

Three days later, LSU filled spots 104 and 105 with Aidan Anding and Gabriel Reliford. That was the blink. Wright and Harris were out, and on the same day the SEC scheduled its presidents and chancellors to discuss whether LSU should remain in the conference.

REDACTED recognized surrender immediately.

“LSU just ran up the white flag,” TheRealCobra1 wrote.

Duluthvol68 had the Tennessee translation: “Not a surprise. LSU blinked. Kiffin quit like he did with us and Ole Miss.”

That did not mean peace. Tennessee fans regard retreat as the enemy showing them where to aim.

“It’s not over,” Jaybird1 wrote. “The SEC will be putting a leash on LSU to put a muzzle on Lane.”

Then VolsForever901 brought back the Cajun shit-talk: “That ‘cold cup of gumbo’ is about to come back around to LSU.”

That line belonged to LSU players’ lawyer Tony Clayton, who celebrated the injunction by saying justice had been served to the SEC “like a cold cup of gumbo.” Five days later, REDACTED had reheated it and sent it back to Baton Rouge.

By then Greg Sankey had become decorative. The SEC commissioner could still produce a statement, of course. He had reached the stage of leadership where 240 carefully chosen words entered the room and not one of them could lift a folding chair.

Figuratively flaccid. And, according to an possibly fabricated medical exam without Sankey’s participation, probably not a great bet literally, either.

The thread turned to Donde Plowman, Chancellor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — and, around REDACTED, all-around badass.

Angry was Part One. Now she wanted LSU out of the SEC. Not fined. Not scolded. Gone.

This is where Donde gets dangerous in the REDACTED imagination. Lane turns press conferences into hostage negotiations. Sankey writes statements. Donde starts calling people before anybody admits there is a meeting worth calling people about.

Sankey was preparing an agenda. Donde was preparing presidents.

One gets a call about institutional control. Another is reminded that LSU has now made every future eligibility fight somebody else’s problem. A third does not need convincing so much as permission to stop pretending this is normal. Nobody gets threatened. That is amateur hour. Consensus is cleaner.

By dinner, a president who woke up planning to keep LSU in the league is asking how many votes removal actually takes. Donde knows the number. The Board assumes she knew it before breakfast.

Meanwhile, the message board had skipped straight past ordinary punishment. Fines were weak. Suspensions lacked imagination. Men with usernames left over from the Majors-Fulmer eras were essentially demanding that LSU be loaded into a commode and double-flushed past New Orleans.

Donde did not need the toilet flushes. She needed eleven votes.

She did not need every president to love Tennessee, either. She needed one tired of Sankey, one embarrassed by LSU, one who already hated Lane Kiffin and one who did not want to be the last school defending Baton Rouge when the room turned.

And because throwing an original SEC member overboard apparently takes longer than ordering DoorDash, there remained the smaller matter of Lane. REDACTED wanted him suspended for the rest of the season. Naturally. Most of America would at least listen to the pitch.

By then proportional response was dead. We were into regime change, except Donde’s version came with Teams invites, quiet callbacks and somebody changing a vote before Sankey realized there was a vote to count.

Her imaginary Wednesday: coffee, Vanderbilt, Georgia, let Sankey think it is still his meeting, find nine, lunch, find ten, deal with Lane, eleven.

That is the fun of it. Everybody else is yelling. Donde is reading bylaws and letting grown adults believe they reached the same conclusion independently.

Lane left Tennessee in the middle of the night sixteen years ago. Tennessee did not forget. Now its chancellor is being cast as the woman quietly working the phones to chase him out of an entire conference.

That is not revenge. That is compound interest.

Sankey can keep issuing flaccid statements. Donde has an iPhone, a pen, a rulebook and, if REDACTED gets its way, eleven votes.

There is no public evidence she made a single call, which naturally made the Board more certain she had made all of them. Somewhere in Birmingham, Sankey was preparing to chair a meeting. In Knoxville, REDACTED had already decided who was running it.

Lane Kiffin spent years teaching college football about FAFO. Donde found the bylaws section.

Related Meltdowns

• Donde’s Inferno, Part I: Next Plowman Up
• Seven-Page Message Board Meltdown: REDACTED Fires Greg Sankey, Expels LSU and Blames Lane Kiffin
• LSU Gets an NFL Tight End. Tennessee Gets Two Games for Flying Coach.