Last December, during a crucial fundraising push for LSU football’s roster, coach Brian Kelly and general manager Austin Thomas went to the corporate headquarters of MMR Group, a national construction firm based in Baton Rouge.

They met with Pepper Rutland, the founder and president. Rutland, a former LSU linebacker and team captain, has donated to LSU for years. He already knew Kelly, but this was the first time the coach visited his office.

“I’ll bet you never thought you would be doing this when you came to LSU,” Rutland told Kelly.

“You’re correct,” he remembered Kelly saying.

But after losing at least three games for the third straight season, LSU had to persuade its donors to invest more than ever in the football team’s name, image and likeness efforts. The Tigers had financially trailed other major programs for the past three years. To retain key players and recruit top transfers, LSU needed to raise more NIL money.

“We had to go around the community,” Kelly said. “We had to go see donors and have meetings and show them our game plan and our business plan for what we were gonna do and how we were gonna do it.”

The goal was to raise at least $13 million for LSU’s NIL collective, Bayou Traditions, with the intention of front-loading deals before the school expects to begin paying players this summer. Over the previous three years combined, the collective’s general counsel said it had spent $11 million on the roster, including $5.5 million last season.

“We competed very well,” athletic director Scott Woodward said, “but we had to really step up our game.”

Planning began in August, and yet LSU needed to raise more money before the transfer portal opened. In a roughly two-week stretch beginning in late November, Kelly and LSU administrators visited several high-level boosters, showing them a new approach to roster management that has been inspired by the NFL.

Their presentation resonated. Donors, some motivated by five-star quarterback Bryce Underwood’s flip from LSU to Michigan, provided multiple seven-figure gifts. The money helped LSU retain starters, add a top-10 freshman class and, according to 247Sports, sign the No. 1 transfer portal class in the country, shaping the season’s outlook.

“We have a football team that now is poised to play with anybody in the SEC,” Kelly said. “We didn’t before.”

LSU looks to the NFL

During one of LSU’s open dates this past fall, Thomas and Woodward visited the Seattle Seahawks. They wanted to understand how an NFL team navigates the salary cap, so they compared ideas and asked questions to ensure LSU took the right approach to roster management.

Woodward called the trip “an affirmation that we were in the right direction and doing the right things.” Thomas also used connections with the Houston Texans to refine his monetary valuation system as LSU’s collective prepared to spend big before schools begin paying athletes July 1 as a result of the House settlement, which still requires final approval.

If the settlement takes effect, schools will be able to distribute up to $20.5 million in the 2025-26 academic year, creating a salary cap that increases annually based on rising revenues. Like other major programs, LSU plans to allocate $13.5 million to football, dividing the money between the 2025 and 2026 teams.

The settlement is designed to curb spending by collectives. Though questions remain about the effectiveness of new enforcement measures, LSU wanted to use the money in Bayou Traditions before deals would need to pass through a clearinghouse designed to judge fair market value. It plans to pay out $10 million in the first half of 2025, money that does not factor into the revenue sharing cap.

“We were able to give (players) a glimpse of what that plus revenue sharing looked like with an assertive and confident contract that could be backed up without guessing,” Kelly said. “We felt confident that we could do some things financially without being put in a situation where we would have to claw it back.”

Thomas has overseen a lot of this in his third stint at LSU. First named LSU’s general manager in 2016, he contributed to the 2019 national championship run before helping assemble Texas A&M’s 2020 Orange Bowl team. Thomas had a hand in signing back-to-back top 2 transfer classes at Ole Miss before LSU hired him again.

“I knew this thing was developing, and I knew we needed to get a top manager in here to do it who understood it and who had done it well,” Woodward said. “Austin is one of the best in the business.”

Thomas uses the valuation system to keep track of spending. Using how much NFL teams spend on certain positions as a guide, LSU set a financial starting point for every spot on the roster. If Thomas inputs a new value somewhere, the other positional values change to stay under the cap. It lets him quickly input and interpret information, helping him make formulaic decisions.

“Knowing when to walk away is just as important as it is to know when to invest,” Thomas said. “And so for us, having the discipline to do that and stay within our model was what was really important.”

Thomas first used the technology created by NextGen Prospect as Ole Miss’ chief of staff in 2022. It started as basic spreadsheets, and the system became more interactive over time. NextGen Prospect co-founder Marc Vittacore said the company works with 39 teams, and about half of them use the technology the way LSU does.

LSU had worked with the service since early 2022, primarily for advanced scouting of opponents. But when Thomas was still at Ole Miss, he asked about improving the system’s ability to monitor spending. Now able to blend advanced scouting with recruiting boards and financial modeling, it made the work easier when someone entered the transfer portal.

“We were able to create a database that allows us to track all of this in real time,” Thomas said. “That helped us get really streamlined as guys would enter the portal and we could see visually where they were for us.”

Planning for the transfer portal

During his two years as Ole Miss’ chief of staff, Thomas worked for a program that built its roster through the transfer portal. The Rebels have been one of the most active teams in the market under coach Lane Kiffin, signing at least 20 transfers in each of the past four years.

Kelly has a different philosophy, preferring to build through the high school ranks and supplement needs in the portal. LSU has target percentages for how many freshmen, returning players and transfers it wants to have on the team every year. Although Thomas declined to share those numbers, the highest percentage is for returning players.

“More times than not, we really want to focus on retention and high school recruiting because we think that’s going to be the sustainable model,” Thomas said. “But as we’ve shown, we’re not afraid to go acquire pieces as needed.”

A year ago, that was not the case. LSU signed nine transfers, giving it the No. 43 class in the country, according to 247Sports, and missed out on top defensive tackles. Kelly said it was a calculated decision not to sign a large transfer portal class because he thought young players needed to gain experience.

“We knew going into the season that our roster was not at the level that it needed to be, but we weren’t ready to do the things necessary to address that,” Kelly said. “We were still a year away in terms of the development of our program. And so for us to go into the transfer portal would have been premature.”

Said Woodward: “We did not do as well as we should have in probably filling the needs that we needed to do from the portal, which other schools did better than we did. I think we clearly saw that and saw that deficiency and made up for it.”

Thomas spent considerable time last year assessing the team to understand skill sets, strengths and weaknesses. Then, in August, LSU’s player personnel staff began rating and calculating the potential value of every player in college football. The staff created a national board of potential targets based on certain metrics, including their background, experience and competition level, in case those players entered the transfer portal.

“A lot of work happens that doesn’t come to fruition,” Thomas said, “but at the end of the day, the ones that do, it was worth it and it paid off.”

At the same time, LSU began to raise money, knowing it needed more. Woodward acknowledged that LSU was behind other top schools. Jared Wilson, the president of Bayou Traditions, said in February that LSU’s collective “did not spend, on the team, what most of the SEC schools really spent” last year. Ole Miss, for example, reportedly invested more than $10 million.

Some high-level donors were still skeptical of NIL and found it hard to believe the numbers circulating around other teams. LSU also does not have a singular booster who supports the fund, which Rutland said “puts a pretty big drain on the donor arrangements in this state,” and the collective had struggled to establish a grassroots pipeline.

“We always had a plan to fundraise and to raise money, and we have good, loyal donors that step up,” Woodward said. “But we just did not have that whale of a donor to come in and say, ‘Hey, carte blanche, go’ like other institutions.”

Bryce Underwood’s impact at LSU

The night of Nov. 21, Carlos Spaht sat in a bank board meeting, listening to a presentation as his phone began to buzz. Spaht, the general counsel and former manager of LSU’s collective, got so many calls and text messages that he thought something had happened to a member of his family.

Underwood, the No. 1 overall recruit in the country, had flipped to Michigan. LSU’s offer would have made Underwood the highest-paid player on the team last year, but he reportedly received a lucrative NIL deal funded by the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, a multinational computer technology company.

Woodward”It was an aha moment for a lot of donors.”“Everybody who has given more than $100,000 over the last three years called me within a 12-minute span is what it felt like,” Spaht said.From Spaht’s point of view, the effect of Underwood’s decision on LSU donors “cannot be overstated.” He said some contributed to NIL for the first time, and LSU’s collective received several seven-figure donations in December.

“I think we would have been fine, ultimately,” Spaht said, “but that sort of turned on a faucet that was pretty amazing.”Thomas acknowledged that losing Underwood resonated with donors, but he said it did not change LSU’s approach.

“We had plans long before that,” Thomas said. “That just shed, in my opinion, some light on the situation with the general public and our donors and fan base, you know? We knew leading into the portal season, we were already going to have to be very buttoned up in what we did and how we did it.”

Belleville High School quarterback Bryce Underwood reacts after signing to play NCAA football at Michigan during a news conference in Belleville, Mich., Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Paul Sancya

With about two weeks until the transfer portal opened, Kelly said LSU “had to raise millions of dollars in a very short period of time to be able to influence the roster.” He matched up to $1 million in NIL contributions with a donation to the Tiger Athletic Foundation’s scholarship fund.Thomas estimated LSU met with 20-25 donors, giving them a presentation that included the monetary valuation system, the importance of NIL and the spending of other programs.

“It was an aha moment for a lot of donors,” Woodward said.One of them, Rutland, had given smaller amounts to LSU’s NIL fund before and has donated to other projects. He thought about what could happen if LSU fell further behind. Though he doesn’t like the current set-up, he has seen losing eras. He gave a seven-figure donation, fearing how long it would take to return from irrelevancy.

“You just have to make the decision,” Rutland said. “Are you willing to help participate in a system that you don’t agree with, that you think is flawed terribly but keeps you in the mix of a winning program while this all gets sorted out? That was it. I just thought coming back would be way too hard. It may take years and years and years.”

LSU’s ‘unique situation’As LSU landed transfers, including three senior edge rushers, sophomore defensive end Gabriel Reliford wondered what their arrivals meant for him.

“Dang,” Reliford said, “are they trying to replace me?”

Reliford asked LSU’s coaches, who told him the additions created competition that would make him better.

“They only replace you if you let them,” Reliford said, “so just go out and work and show that you’re the better man.”

When the transfer portal opened, LSU looked for experienced players who could immediately contribute and wanted to compete for a championship. It intentionally did most of its work in the December portal window before landing two more players this spring in USF defensive lineman Bernard Gooden and Houston safety AJ Haulcy, whose commitment Sunday night finished the class.

The Tigers added 18 transfers, the most in one year under Kelly. Seven were ranked in the top 100 transfers, according to 247Sports, which tied for the most in the country with Miami and Texas Tech. The class has a combined 262 career starts, and all but two of them played for another power conference team last season.

“This couldn’t be ‘We’re taking a flier on a guy from Cornell,’ ” Kelly said. “They had to be frontline starters with experience because then what you did last year doesn’t matter. The lumps that you took last year, they don’t help you with the depth that you need in your program.”

As LSU worked on its class, Kelly referred to donors as “shareholders” in the process. He said they were allowed access he had never given in three decades of being a head coach. However, LSU had exceeded its $13 million fundraising goal, some of which was used on the 2024 team. Spaht said the majority of the money came from five to seven donors.

“I’d field calls, ‘Hey, what’s going on? We got a shot? How’s it going?’ ” Kelly said. “That’s the only way you could do it in the manner that we needed to do it. I had never done it that way before, but that’s what we needed to do to get the kind of impact in our program that we needed.”

LSU does not expect to sign this many transfers every year. Although needs can shift, affecting the ideal percentages, Thomas said dipping so heavily into the portal will not be the “norm.” LSU still wants to build through traditional recruiting and retention, and so far, it has the nation’s No. 4 recruiting class in 2026.

“It was a unique situation this year,” Thomas said. “The assessment of where we were and what we could accomplish in bringing this group of players together — both in retention, portal and high school — gave us the best opportunity to win a championship.”

That is the expectation now — or, at least, to reach the College Football Playoff for the first time in Kelly’s LSU tenure.

The team has to make all the new players fit together before a difficult opening game at Clemson and a tough conference schedule. But Kelly has expressed confidence in the possibility, calling this the best roster in his four years at LSU.

“Regardless of how we played the game before, we would have needed help,” Kelly said. “Something favorably would have had to happen. We don’t need that. We need to play the game, play the game the right way, be prepared, do the right things in all areas. If we do that, we’ve got a team that can win the SEC.”