LSU Football: Why TreVonte’ Citizen didn’t sign with the Tigers
By Zach Ragan
LSU Football missed on one of its top 2022 recruiting targets when four-star in-state running back TreVonte’ Citizen elected to sign with the Miami Hurricanes last week.
Citizen’s decision to sign with Miami was definitely surprising. The thought going into National Signing Day was that if Citizen didn’t land with LSU, he was heading to Auburn.
So when Citizen announced that he was signing with Miami, it raised some eyebrows.
In this day of NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals, it’s easy to assume that money is playing a big factor in these decisions.
That’s not always fair to the players signing.
But in Citizen’s case, it appears that NIL deals were the driving force in his decision to sign with the Hurricanes.
The reason TreVonte Citizen spurned LSU Football for Miami
Gordon McKernan, a Baton Rouge based attorney who has been helping with NIL deals, appeared on The Jordy Culotta Show recently and he made it clear why Citizen spurned LSU for Miami.
The Hurricanes have more NIL opportunities.
“When he (Citizen) was calling the players, different ones he knows, he was asking how many deals they had, they weren’t able to tell him that they had a lot of deals,” said McKernan.
“That’s why we lost. They don’t have to be big deals, some of these deals, are $500 or $1,000, that will go a long way.”
I have two takeaways here.
The first is that I don’t love players just going where they get the most money. I have no issue with players profiting off their NIL — I think that rule should’ve changed a long time ago.
But it shouldn’t be all about the highest bidder.
However, I understand that’s kind of the world we’re in right now. And if LSU wants to land elite talent year after year, then they’re going to have to step up their NIL game to the same level as Miami and some of these other programs (I don’t know about Texas A&M….it’s kind of ridiculous what they’re supposedly doing with their $25 million rumored “war chest”).
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It’s a new era in college football. LSU must adapt, or they’re going to miss on even more key in-state players in the future.