BATON ROUGE, La. — The most anticipated first game of Lane Kiffin’s career at LSU was, by all accounts, going to be a spectacle, and it managed to deliver on that promise before a single snap was even taken.

The Tigers’ opener against Clemson, which had drawn a crowd that rival the largest in program history, was delayed nearly two hours by a lightning storm that rolled over the stadium in the minutes before kickoff. Fans sat in the dark under the stands for the better part of an evening, watching the sky, while the two teams sat in their respective tunnels, waiting for the clouds to make a decision.

The delay, it turned out, was a mercy of a kind. The game had been set up to include two former NFL signees, defensive lineman Zxavian Harris and tight end Dae’Quan Wright, both of whom had played for Kiffin at Ole Miss before signing professional contracts with the New Orleans Saints and the Cleveland Browns, respectively, and then deciding, against a great deal of league opposition, to come home and play college football again.

The lightning kept them out of the game. Not because anyone benched them, but because, as the night wore on, the game simply never quite started when it was supposed to, and the two players who were the entire reason the game was the most-watched game of the weekend ended up watching it from the tunnel along with everyone else.

“You don’t get to have a lightning storm delay the biggest debut in college football and then act like it’s a normal Thursday. This is the sport now. The weather is a player.”

The legal situation that made the night so fraught is itself a spectacle. The SEC, which prohibits its member schools from signing and playing former professional athletes, sued LSU in federal court in Alabama just hours before kickoff, alleging the university had waged a “deliberate and coordinated campaign” to bring the pros back. A Louisiana state judge, in a separate proceeding, had opened the door for the two players to suit up. The two rulings pointed in opposite directions, and the lightning, which pointed in neither, was the one that ultimately decided the game.

"We have a federal lawsuit, a state court order, and a thunderstorm, all trying to tell the same two players whether they can play football, and the thunderstorm is the only one that's actually been in charge all night."

TODAY'S GAME, BY THE NUMBERS

  • Kickoff delay: nearly two hours
  • Cause: lightning
  • Former NFL players on the roster: 2
  • Former NFL players in the game: 0
  • Court rulings in conflict: 2
  • Weather advisories issued: several, one of which was correct

The game, when it finally got underway, proceeded with the rest of the roster, and the two former professionals sat on the sideline, in full uniform, ready to play in a contest that, for the first hour and a half, had not. The scene — two grown men who had held professional contracts, sitting in the tunnel in the rain waiting for a thunderstorm to end — became, by a wide margin, the image of the night.

At press time, the federal case was ongoing, the state ruling stood, and the lightning had, for the moment, gone away. A source close to the situation summed up the weekend’s central question: “I don’t know who’s in charge. I just know it’s not the football team.”