Editor’s note: On Tuesday night, LSU ended its quest to add ex-NFL players to its roster.Lane Kiffin has a long history of getting fired by his employers. But getting his employer kicked out of its conference would be next level.College football’s resident troll has managed to infuriate SEC members so drastically with his recent pursuit of players who were in NFL training camps that this wholly unprecedented sentence appeared in the conference’s amended lawsuit against LSU officials Tuesday:The (conference) CEOs will meet on September 10, 2026, to decide whether to terminate Louisiana State University (“LSU”) as an SEC member institution pursuant to Section 3.1.5 of the SEC Constitution and Bylaws.Is it all a big bluff? Probably. That it would even get this far, though, tells you just how disgusted the other 15 SEC schools are at Kiffin’s defiance in pursuing players who signed NFL contracts, which continued even after he stopped short of putting them on the roster last weekend. And they seem even more concerned that none of his supposed supervisors did anything to stop him.The SEC is threatening to kick out LSU and Lane KiffinJustin WilliamsThe most notable passage in Tuesday’s filing comes in a section recounting a meeting of the other 15 presidents last Friday, before LSU finally opted against rostering ex-NFL players Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris. The CEOs expressed “great concern” that president Wade Rousse and athletic director Verge Ausberry “have no meaningful control over Defendant Kiffin or the football program at LSU.”The SEC uses some version of the phrase “lack of institutional control” five times to describe the current environment at LSU. Which sure seems accurate. The only Louisiana official who seems to have any control over LSU athletics is the governor, Jeff Landry, who’s every bit as much of a loose cannon as the coach.Only once in modern history has a major football conference kicked out one of its members: The former Big East, with Temple, in the early 2000s. At the time, Temple had a horrible football team, playing in front of minuscule crowds. Which makes it truly astonishing that LSU, which demolished Clemson on Saturday in front of 100,000 raucous spectators, would even be up for consideration.The increasingly hostile standoff between the SEC and LSU began with a lawsuit filed in Baton Rouge last month by a group of athletes who completed their four-year careers last spring and are now seeking a fifth year of eligibility due to the NCAA’s recent rule change. As in most of these cases, they found a local judge who first granted them a temporary restraining order, followed last Thursday by a preliminary injunction, preventing the NCAA from denying their eligibility.What made this case unique, though, was that the plaintiffs included some of Kiffin’s former Ole Miss players who, at the time, were active on NFL rosters, now looking to return to college and play for their former coach. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey testified for three hours in the preliminary injunction hearing last Thursday, only for Judge William Jorden to rule that the SEC could not enforce its own ban against schools rostering recent NFL players.“I’m showing you I’ve got a big gun,” Jorden said, directed at the SEC.But that same day, the SEC filed a federal lawsuit in Alabama, this one against Kiffin, Rousse, Ausberry and other LSU officials, seeking an injunction to affirm its ability to enforce its own rules. On Tuesday, they amended it to seek a more urgent temporary restraining order in advance of Thursday’s expulsion vote.Perhaps the last straw was Kiffin doing one of his patented trolls at halftime Saturday night, with his team up 31-3, telling ESPN’s Holly Rowe, “Imagine if we had pro players.” It’s included in the amended filing as evidence of the coach and the school’s continued undermining of the conference’s policy.In hindsight, the SEC began paving this path last week with its initial request for a federal injunction. In making the case why its policies should be legally protected, it wrote, “Forced association with a member whose conduct is antithetical to the SEC’s mission and core values violates the Conference’s fundamental First Amendment rights. LSU has rejected those core values repeatedly and publicly.”Meanwhile, Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman said last Tuesday, “Our group is united on this. This is not a rule we will budge on. Enough is enough.” Tellingly, her LSU counterpart, Rousse, has said nothing at all.At this point, you may be asking yourself, why are all these people so worked up about this one relatively narrow issue? Especially given this NFL thing is due to an unusual, one-off situation stemming from the NCAA’s transition to a new eligibility model?Well, that’s easy. Because it’s Kiffin.Lane Kiffin stirred up drama in the conference during his one season at Tennessee. (Larry McCormack / USA Today via Reuters Connect)The sport’s most villainous coach has been a thorn in the SEC’s side going all the way back to his lone season as Tennessee’s head coach in 2009. The late Mike Slive had to reprimand Kiffin twice in an eight-month span, first for publicly accusing Florida’s Urban Meyer of cheating for something that wasn’t cheating, then for criticizing the officials after a game.At the time, Kiffin’s actions were chalked up as a symptom of immaturity from a 34-year-old head coach. But Kiffin is 51 now, and nothing has changed. If anything, his success at Ole Miss and the ensuing fawning of him on ESPN’s airwaves has only enabled him further. His Ole Miss teams were the champions of faking injuries. He ignited a nuclear war between league members LSU and Ole Miss. And now he’s out there making a mockery of his own conference’s rules.Heck, his one line in that Dr Pepper Fansville commercial is: “I’m not really known for following the rules.”Were this a trial, it would not be hard to prove the other schools’ motive.Is all of this really going to cause the SEC to expel one of its founding members, holder of recent national championships in multiple sports? Probably not. But the SEC likely views this as a defining moment in its move toward more self-governance. It needs a judge to reaffirm once and for all that it can discipline its own members.And presumably the SEC wouldn’t mind if that caused Kiffin to back down once and for all on the NFL issue. Though he’ll inevitably find some new way to tick them off.