If rival coaches can't stop LSU's active NBA player, they should recruit better

I have been covering this sport since the days when a collegiate point guard would smoke a cigarette at halftime, and I have never seen a bigger overreaction than the crying I am hearing about RJ Luis Jr. this week. On Monday, a Louisiana judge granted the 2025 Big East Player of the Year a temporary injunction to suit up for LSU this season, completely waving off the fact that the young man has already signed multiple NBA contracts. The purists are furious. The talk-radio callers are screaming about the death of amateurism. And I am sitting here wondering when we all became so soft.

Let us look at the facts before we start clutching our pearls. Luis did not just sign one professional contract, he signed three. He is currently on the books for the Charlotte Hornets, the Utah Jazz, and a two-way deal with the Oklahoma City Thunder. That is not a scandal, that is just a kid with an incredible work ethic diversifying his portfolio. The NCAA tried to argue that being a salaried, pension-earning employee of the National Basketball Association violates their bylaws. Thank God for the Louisiana judicial system. A state judge looked at the evidence, looked at LSU’s glaring weakness on the perimeter, and rightfully concluded that irreparable harm would be done to the Tigers’ spacing if they had to rely on a traditional college sophomore.

Back in my day, we did not have state courts issuing emergency injunctions to let active pros play in the SEC. We just had boosters who owned local Chevrolet dealerships handing you the keys to a Corvette and respectfully asking you to beat Alabama. But the game evolves. The eye test tells me that Luis is a difference-maker, and if the professional leagues want to pay him a combined twelve million dollars to live in a Baton Rouge dormitory with a guy named Skeeter, that is simply the free market functioning exactly as intended.

I was having a bone-in ribeye with a league office executive in Chicago last month, and he said the exact same thing. People are losing their minds over the sanctity of the amateur game. Let me tell you something about the amateur game, it does not exist. If a young man with a fully vested retirement account and a signature shoe line wants to spend his Tuesday night dropping forty points on a bunch of teenagers who just failed a geology midterm, I say we let him. You simply cannot teach that kind of competitive fire.

Furlong gets it. I sat next to him at a panel on collective bargaining last spring, and the man understands that college basketball is an entertainment product first and a glorified gym class second. The real victims in this situation are not the opposing college teams, the real victims are the NBA front offices who are now being forced to share their first-round investment with a university marching band.

You think it is easy for a professional general manager to watch his highest-paid rookie taking charges in a hostile road environment at Auburn? The logistics alone are a nightmare. The kid is double-booked. He has an NBA shootaround in Atlanta at ten in the morning, a mandatory NCAA compliance seminar on sports betting at one in the afternoon, and a nationally televised SEC tip-off at seven at night. He is flying commercial to abide by collegiate gifting rules while simultaneously cashing union-mandated per diem checks from the Hornets. It builds character.

And yet, I keep hearing rival college coaches complain that it is deeply unfair to field a roster of pre-med students and unrecruited walk-ons against a guy who has his own personal chef and a union rep. To those coaches, I say recruit better. If you cannot convince an active NBA shooting guard to take a sabbatical in collegiate athletics to boost your tournament resume, that is a failure of your own front office. Nobody is stopping Vanderbilt from signing LeBron James to a one-and-done graduate degree program.

The locker room dynamics are supposedly another issue. The critics claim Luis will ruin the chemistry of a college team. Let me assure you, nothing improves the chemistry of a college locker room quite like a teammate who can legally tip the equipment manager five hundred dollars to wash his practice jersey. Luis is not bringing his teammates down, he is elevating them. He is showing these college kids what it takes to be a professional, mostly by bringing his entourage into the student dining hall and having his agent negotiate with the cafeteria staff for better omelets.

Gable and his forward-thinking approach are exactly what this sport has been missing. The NBA has finally realized that the best minor league system in the world is just the SEC, subsidized by alumni donations. Why bother running a developmental team when you can just stash your draft picks in Louisiana and let a state judge handle the paperwork?

The NCAA keeps threatening to appeal the injunction, citing their rulebook as if anyone has read it since 1985. They claim that allowing an NBA player to compete for a collegiate championship fundamentally alters the integrity of the tournament. To which I ask, what integrity? The tournament is a television show designed to sell light beer and pickup trucks. Adding a guy who just dropped thirty points on the Boston Celtics into a first-round matchup against a plucky mid-major from the Sun Belt Conference is exactly the kind of high-stakes television we deserve.

We need to stop coddling the college game. If an eighteen-year-old accounting major from Texas A&M gets his ankles broken on national television by a man with a multi-million-dollar endorsement portfolio, he should thank him for the exposure. The game is changing, and the people complaining about RJ Luis Jr. are the same people who wanted to keep the shot clock at forty-five seconds. Let the man play his professional schedule, let him play his college schedule, and if he still has cartilage left in his knees by March, let him cut down the nets.