Revised SEC penalties for field invasions haven't ended them yet. But officials say they're safer

If 16th-ranked LSU defeats No. 14 Alabama on an approaching Saturday night in November, and fans at Death Valley respond by rushing the field again, the Tigers' athletic program would have to pay up to $500,000 to the Crimson Tide.

The high-stakes rivalry game on Nov. 9 could serve as the latest test of a Southeastern Conference policy on field invasions that was reworked before the previous football season.

The goal was to stop such trespasses, but this season has seen a few nonetheless — including at LSU when the Tigers beat Mississippi in overtime on Oct. 12. LSU had to pay $250,000 to the Rebels. If it happens again, LSU will have paid a combined total of up to $750,000 to rival SEC athletic programs during just this football season.

While LSU coach Brian Kelly worries about safety when fans rush the field, he doesn't sound too concerned about the fines — even in this NIL era, when schools are spending more on players than ever and presumably would rather not also be ordered to supplement the athletic budgets of their SEC opponents.

“Those kinds of penalties are probably going to be passed off through administration, and I just don’t see that impacting NIL to the point where there’s a competitive advantage," Kelly said.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m advocating, but if you’re winning each week and storming the field, your NIL is going to go up because you’re generating a lot of support yourself,” Kelly added. “I’m not trying to be a wisecracker here in that sense, because it is a serious matter.”

Kelly — who has experienced three field invasions at home and two on the road since coming to LSU in 2022 — does not quibble with the current fine structure.

“They should be fines that you feel,” Kelly said. “And what you try to do is your due diligence to make sure that there’s beefed-up security so you can keep people from washing onto the field to the point where there are security risks.”

The fines cover football and basketball combined.

A first offense is $100,000, a second is $250,000, and it maxes out at $500,000 for a third or subsequent offense.

LSU had to pay $100,000 for fans rushing its home court after a men's basketball victory over Kentucky last February. That's why the payment to Ole Miss this football season was $250,000. But LSU also received $100,000 from Mississippi after losing to the Rebels in Oxford in 2023.

Meanwhile, fans have rushed the field after Alabama's losses at Vanderbilt and at Tennessee this season, and the Crimson Tide is getting $100,000 from each program. Tennessee, meanwhile, is in the black right now because it got $250,000 from Arkansas after losing on the road to the Razorbacks on Oct. 5.

While the invasions haven't entirely stopped, SEC officials have been pleased by the effort member schools have made to safely and quickly get visiting teams off the field as fans come pouring over the walls. That, said SEC Associate Commissioner Herb Vincent, was a main goal of the new policy.

“There has been an increased focus by our schools to keep players and team personnel safe when it does occur,” Vincent said. “School game management staffs have especially put a lot of time into developing effective strategies for safely getting opposing teams and staffs off the field.”

Vincent attended the Ole Miss game at LSU and witnessed how security workers quickly ran ropes in front of the Rebels bench as the winning touchdown was scored in overtime, creating a brief buffer that helped Mississippi get to its locker room with limited interference from fans.

Alabama first-year coach Kalen DeBoer, meanwhile, was pleased there were no significant incidents with his players at Vanderbilt or Tennessee.

“All it takes is one fan who is a little over the top and gets connected with maybe one of our players who's super emotional, just laid it all on the field and you've got a recipe for something that could go wrong,” DeBoer said. "Our guys have handled themselves well when we've been in those situations."

While Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said the number of field rushing incidents this season indicated current policies might not be working as well as intended, Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea took a more nuanced position.

"The fines are a deterrent, and I support all that,” Clark said, noting that he does not believe there's “any room for fan engagement on the field because you put at jeopardy the safety of the opposing team.”

“There aren’t a lot of boundaries in those moments and it’s very hard to get order,” he added.

Yet when he reflects on the aftermath of Vanderbilt's upset of then-No. 1 Alabama — when fans rushed the field, removed the goal posts, paraded them through Nashville and dumped them in the Cumberland River — he can't help but feel good about it.

“That moment’s very special and something I’ll always carry with me, and I really don’t want it to play out any other way, to be honest," Clark said. “We needed that as a community here. This community deserved that celebration. And yet I want to grow beyond it and want to get to the point where we expect to be in those games and to win them.”

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AP Sports Writers Mark Long, Teresa Walker, John Zenor, Jim Vertuno and Charles Odum contributed to this report.