College football always delivers some of the weirdest drama. With the season right around the corner, one inane offseason story was able to get in right under the wire.
On Thursday morning, ESPN reported that an attorney for Heisman winner and former LSU star quarterback Jayden Daniels sent a cease-and-desist letter to the school, informing LSU that it is no longer authorized to use Daniels' name, image and likeness. The move stems from the fact that LSU has granted sophomore standout defensive back DJ Pickett the jersey No. 5, which Daniels also wore.
Daniels is almost certainly a victim of bad advice here and is picking a fight not worth the time or trouble. It's well known that his mother, Regina Jackson, who is active in his business affairs, including being lead agent for Daniels in his pro career, is likely leading the push behind the scenes.
But Daniels' own damage-control Instagram statement on Thursday hints at some embarrassment about how this situation has clearly been blown out of proportion.
"I have been locked in on training camp and that's been my number one focus," Daniels wrote. "I have a lot of gratitude for my time at LSU and I'm proud of what my teammates and I accomplished there. Obviously there are issues to be worked out between my team and LSU and my hope is that it will get done privately. My sole personal focus is on Commanders' football. I realize the business of football is unique and I trust this can all be resolved."
Daniels' statement reads as a not-so-thinly-veiled public message to his own team to cut it out. The mere idea that Daniels would be focusing on this while prepping for an NFL season and returning from an elbow injury is ridiculous. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the cease-and-desist letter may have been happening without Daniels' knowledge, or at least he was under the assumption that this was going to be kept quiet.
Instead, it leaked, and sloppy lawyering and a misunderstanding of how to use leverage have been exposed.
Inside this situation is also broader discourse about how players interface with their former schools now that a school has contractual obligations about how to use a player's likeness. Like it or not, this is the ancillary price of the NIL era. Daniels has few, if any, true allegiances to LSU. He's not from Louisiana, and played the first three years of his career at Arizona State. He was brought into Baton Rouge to do a job, and he excelled in that role and brought the school a Heisman Trophy. But simply put: his time at LSU was strictly business. Daniels will never be the most beloved LSU transfer quarterback and Heisman winner in school history. It is perhaps fitting that his lasting success and honors at LSU were individual, while Joe Burrow delivered an undefeated season and a national championship along with more prolific stats.
You can choose how to associate with your former school as a transfer player, and Daniels' camp has made a choice.
There is a pattern here from Daniels' camp
This is not the only former school Daniels' camp has had bad blood with. Arizona State cut ties with Jackson, Daniels's mother, because she allegedly paid for flights and lodging for recruits who impermissibly visited the school during the COVID-19 dead period in 2020.
On the issue of the jersey number, the Brian Kelly LSU regime promised Pickett the No. 5 jersey during his recruitment, but chose not to issue No. 5 to him without Daniels' approval. Kelly also pointed to LSU's treatment of Joe Burrow's No. 9, which has not been worn since Burrow's Heisman Trophy-winning 2019 season.
From the ESPN report:
"Sources told ESPN that Daniels believes he is being treated differently than Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, whose No. 9 jersey hasn't been worn at LSU since he won the Heisman Trophy and led LSU to a 15-0 record and College Football Playoff national championship in 2019."
Daniels' Heisman season came during a 9-3 LSU regular season where he compiled nearly 5,000 yards and scored 50 total touchdowns.
Kelly declined to comment to CBS Sports, but did tell ESPN he did not issue Pickett the number because Daniels wasn't in favor. Pickett wore No. 3 as a freshman.
"I just wasn't prepared to do it until we got a full commitment from another Heisman Trophy winner," Kelly told ESPN. "We didn't want to issue [Burrow's] No. 9, so you can't treat one differently from the other."
Kiffin gave Pickett the No. 5. The new LSU coach did not recruit Pickett to Baton Rouge, but did some calculus and would certainly like to keep his star player happy in order to field the caliber of secondary LSU is used to having.
"DJ is in [No.] 5, and that was a situation that was promised to him in recruiting here, for him to sign here," Kiffin told ESPN. "I've done a lot of research on that with the family and the representatives and the people, so really I didn't have a decision to make. It was promised to the kid. It wasn't done for whatever [reason]. I'm not going to get into that.
"I'm not going to judge something [that was done] when I wasn't here. But when a kid is promised something to come to a school, he should wear it. So at that point, I don't think that's really my decision. We should honor what he was told."
In a preseason camp press conference on Thursday, Pickett said he wore No. 5 since he was four-years-old. "I wore the number my whole life... It was the number I was promised. I wish Jayden the best. Good player and he did real good here."
The politics of jersey numbers
Retiring jerseys and completely taking them out of rotation is noble, but in college it is logistically silly. Double-numbering is already an aesthetic scourge upon the sport for understandable reasons when you only have 100 numerals to dole out to more than 100 players. The 2026 LSU roster currently features dozens of players wearing the same jersey numbers as teammates, something common with offense/defense in college football.
LSU's jersey retirement bylaws (somehow a real thing that exists) state that jersey numbers retired after 2007 can be given out to current players at the current coach's discretion. This was essentially an attempt at making sure nobody ever wore the jerseys of legendary basketball players Pistol Pete Maravich, Shaquille O'Neal, Bob Pettitt; famed baseball coach Skip Bertman; or Billy Cannon, at the time the school's only Heisman winner.
LSU also has a complicated jersey tradition because No. 7 and No. 18 have added significance. In relatively new school traditions, No. 7 (which will be officially retired later this season) is given to the team's best playmaker and No. 18 is given to one who exemplifies impressive leadership. But even that isn't as straightforward as it seems. In 2023, Kelly tweaked the No. 7 tradition to represent a Louisiana-born playmaker. Offensive lineman Will Campbell earned the No. 7, but due to NCAA restrictions around linemen wearing single-digit numbers, he instead wore 66 and a patch denoting the No. 7 distinction. No other player was given the No. 7 that year.
For now, it seems Pickett will wear No. 5. There's no telling which elegant solution LSU comes up with to placate both its talented player and its jilted Heisman winner.
