In Baton Rouge, there?s a $100 million football coach and everyone else

He left Notre Dame to sign the most valuable contract in the history of college football: 10 years, a guaranteed annual salary of at least $9 million, and with bonuses it could be worth more than $100 million.From 2015: Big-time college athletic programs are taking in more money than ever — and spending it just as fastKelly, dining with LSU board of supervisors member Collis Temple Jr., shook Chris’s hand. But he also wanted to observe how Kelly interacted with a “commoner,” Temple says, considering every football town in America is filled with so many Chris Toombses, some of whom clean the homes of the few Brian Kellys, cook or deliver food for them, mow their lawns or play football for them.“I want you to speak to him,” Temple recalls thinking, “and I want to see your reaction. Even friends from back home in Kentwood, La., questioned why he would enroll … there … when he could have gone to Grambling State or Southern, both historically Black institutions.Even now, Temple says, there’s a deep skepticism of LSU among the state’s Black residents, many of whom never forgave the university for remaining segregated long after other schools.“Black folk didn’t give a f--- about LSU, man,” Temple says. To the east, 80 percent of public school students are considered financially disadvantaged, and so many murders have occurred at the Tigerland apartment complex near the stadium that a judge declared it a legal nuisance.Fans “will probably pay somebody in those apartment complexes $30 to park their car there and go see Brian Kelly,” says Davante Lewis, a Baton Rouge resident who studies government spending as it affects — and often eludes — low- to moderate-income Louisianans.Not long after Temple joined LSU’s board in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic paused sports and cost the school $81 million. In a state where one in five residents lives below the poverty line, on a campus where the football team’s player workforce is unpaid, in a city where the predominantly Black state house district that includes Tiger Stadium has a median household income of $24,865 a year, the White man who will coach there will be paid no less than $24,657 a day.It’s just the new cost of competing, Temple says, but it’s still nauseating in its excess. Cobalt blue suit, thin legs crossed, a Newport between his lips.“Mind if I … ?” Chris says, already reaching for a chair.Bergeron smiles when he sees an old friend, and they launch into the only subject more incendiary around here than politics: LSU football. His classes aren’t much more diverse, though because last year LSU appointed its first Black president, Chris says he hopes students like him someday won’t be penniless and feel so alone.“This is just one of those things that I have to go through,” he says. Those jobs are rare and don’t typically pay well, but it would be Chris’s latest attempt at a foot in the door of a fenced-off world — the one where Brian Kelly exists.“They’re going to need somebody to help them navigate that transition,” he says of LSU’s athletes, many of them young people of color. Two men seemingly from different worlds, who represent the two ends of an extreme, again occupying the same space and breathing the same air.“I’d just hope that the money wouldn’t separate the humanity between people,” he says, “and try to stay as optimistic as possible.”He turns left, heading home toward Hermitage to check on Alice.“I would just see it that he’s a person,” Chris says, “just like I’m a person.”