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Well, working this out in private seems to be a futile endeavor at this point. Not only is everything out there in the open, but everybody is going to have an opinion on it, and nobody is going to come out as a winner.
While LSU does retire jersey numbers, it has only done so four times and still allows all but one of them to be worn. The only number that will never be worn again by an LSU football player is the No. 20 that belonged to Billy Cannon, the program’s first Heisman Trophy winner.
LSU’s athletic website says that any jersey number retired after Jan. 1, 2007, “does not preclude a current student-athlete in that sport from wearing the jersey number in that or any other sport, subject to the discretion of the head coach.”
Some other numbers have simply not been given out in recent years, with former quarterback Joe Burrow’s No. 9 being the most obvious example. While Burrow, like Daniels, won a Heisman Trophy at LSU, Burrow also helped deliver an undefeated season, a national championship and was a part of one of the greatest single college football teams of the modern era.
Daniels spent two years at LSU, while the Tigers lost three games in each of them and won a ReliaQuest Bowl in his Heisman Trophy season. Even so, Daniels was an all-time great player at LSU, and a Heisman Trophy does bring a certain level of respect. He feels that respect should include nobody else wearing his number.
LSU under new head coach Lane Kiffin obviously disagrees. Adding to the confusion here is that Pickett already played at LSU before this season and wore No. 3 in his first season. So the sudden change is directly a result of Kiffin making a decision because Pickett was apparently promised the number during his recruitment.
In some ways, this is the first chaotic story to emerge for LSU in the Kiffin era. There will likely be more, as tends to be the case wherever Kiffin goes.
It is also another example of how much of a business high-level college athletics has become, where an all-time great player at a program can try to stop the school from promoting his past play. Daniels is treating LSU like any other business and not an institution that he loved and played for.
The haphazard nature of LSU’s handling of jersey numbers, specifically as it relates to Kiffin, understandably has Daniels confused and obviously angered. But it’s also not a PR battle he is ever going to win outside of LSU. And maybe not even within LSU.
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