Do y’all remember Hank Williams Jr. belting out, “Are you ready for some lawsuits?” during his televised anthem every autumnal Monday night?

Wait a sec. I am being told the actual lyrics use the word “football” where I placed the word “lawsuits.” My mistake.

But I hope you can forgive me for my blunder, beloved reader, because in the year 2026 those two words are moving closer to becoming synonyms, especially when we are talking about college football.

We are a quarter of the way through the season, and the discussion remains dominated by that incorrigible little scamp Lane Kiffin’s attempt to add two players who previously signed NFL contracts to his Louisiana State University football team.

Up until this gambit, Kiffin has been more of a pebble-in-your-shoe type of annoyance, but this scheme even had the Southeastern Conference considering removing LSU, a charter member dating back to 1932, from conference membership.

The two players LSU wanted to add to its roster were hoping to take advantage of a recent NCAA rule change. This new policy is actually good in that it limits the amount of time college athletes can participate in college sports.

Collegiate competitors can now play up to five seasons before they turn 24 unless they sign a U.S.-based professional sports contract, in which case they forfeit collegiate athletic eligibility. There will be some athletes who are 24 and older who will be grandfathered in to play college sports this season, though, because they were already enrolled in a university.

However, the NCAA unwisely passed the rule at a time when college teams could still add players before their seasons began, leading to a lawsuit involving the two players cut from NFL rosters in preseason camp but who had earlier signed professional contracts.

According to ESPN’s Mark Schlabach, who was covering the players’ court case, nothing in the rulebook explicitly stated that players who had exhausted their eligibility under the old rules by playing four seasons would be ineligible to play five seasons under the new rules as long as they are younger than 24.

Specifically, the two players trying to join Kiffin’s LSU team said they would not have signed professional contracts making them ineligible for collegiate competition if they had known the NCAA planned to change the rule to allow them a fifth year of eligibility.

A Louisiana state judge agreed and ruled for them to be eligible to play this season.

This led to the SEC’s threat to kick LSU out of the conference for violating conference rules by adding players who signed professional contracts to its roster.

LSU eventually backed down and kept the two players off the team. The conference might not be able to overrule a judge’s order, but it could and did make it known to Kiffin and the university’s administration that LSU needed the SEC more than the SEC needed LSU.

Conferences banding together to make and enforce rules might be the future of college athletics.

How sustainable that model can be is a huge question mark, but, at least in this instance, the four big conferences – led by the two conference superpowers of the SEC and Big Ten – were able to accomplish something when NCAA authority was left wanting.

Alex Angle from Alabama Daily News reported the U.S. Senate might pass the Protect College Sports Act as early as this week, which would grant the NCAA special powers to enforce nationwide rules over college sports.

Still, there are roadblocks and questions about the Protect College Sports Act including: do we want the federal government to be further involved with college sports; do we want to empower a habitually ham-handed NCAA even more; and will this law stand up in federal court?

You read that last point right. Even if the U.S. House of Representatives and President Donald Trump pass the legislation into law, which will be November at the earliest, college athletes will still have a strong case to say the new law limits their ability to maximize their earning potential.

So, again, are you ready for some lawsuits? Because they are coming if this passes.

Could now be the time for conferences to work together and take over governance for college sports? There is no clear answer, but if the Protect College Sports Act fails to prop up the NCAA, we might be about to find out.

At least Kiffin lost on Saturday to the Ole Miss team he stranded last year in the midst of its best season in decades. Karma still works even when governance fails.