The wild world of LSU: from tigers on the field to wooing ex-NFL players

Recruiting ex-pros. Inflaming Ukraine-Russia tensions. Suing the SEC and being sued back. The school is adapting to a new reality – and also creating a new oneIn 1893, a chemistry professor named Charles Coates arrived at Louisiana State University and wrote that, to his surprise, “there was practically no athletics in the student body: no football, no tennis, and only very little baseball in the spring.” A broad program of sports struck him as the kind of thing a school should have, particularly as US universities were beginning to tout intercollegiate athletics as critical to a balanced higher-ed experience and another way to justify the cost of entry. But 133 years on, sports aren’t merely the main attraction at LSU. They’re the school’s raison d’être, the blinkered obsession that consu