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Verge Ausberry stood at the front of the room and started telling stories. He talked about Michigan basketball’s Fab Five, and how the Wolverines’ starting lineup from the 1990s, despite their fame, didn’t make any money off of their name, image and likeness. He told a story about Shabazz Napier, the former UConn point guard who told reporters during the Huskies’ 2014 national championship season that there were nights where he’d go to bed starving. He also discussed lawsuits, namely landmark cases that finally began paying the athletes, that pushed the college sports world to where it is today: On the verge of driving itself off a financial cliff. “It’s not sustainable, the cliff is coming,” Ausberry, LSU’s athletic director, warned the Baton Rouge Rotary Club on Wednesday. “And by December, if we don’t have any (new legistlation) in place, we’re looking at football teams jumping from $50 million to $65-70 million.” LSU, led by Ausberry, is playing a leading role in the chaos that has enveloped college sports. The athletic department is spending upwards of $62 million for the buyouts of former men’s basketball coach Matt McMahon and former football coach Brian Kelly, and that’s before factoring in the money LSU spent on luring Lane Kiffin to replace Kelly and Will Wade to replace McMahon. The Tigers, reportedly, are also spending more than $40 million on its football team and its men’s basketball program has spent aggressively in adding talent from overseas. They have also been active in adding top transfer portal talent in women’s basketball and baseball, which also wasn’t cheap. “We can’t keep it up, we can’t sustain it,” Ausberry said. “A good football team today costs between $40 and $50 million. A basketball team, started at $12 million last year, is about $20 million (this year). A baseball team is pushing close to $10 million. A women’s basketball team is about $5 million.” And that doesn’t include the legal battle set to take place in Baton Rouge on Thursday, which would determine the eligibility of multiple former NFL players looking to return to LSU for a fifth-year of school. Ausberry was reluctant dive into the specifics of the case or his thoughts on the matter, but he did say that LSU would “make sure to follow the SEC and NCAA rules.” All of it, combined with the drama that has particularly been associated Wade and Kiffin, has placed LSU front and center in the news since the end of last year. “Everyone is saying to me, ‘Hey Verge, every day you’re on TV,’ ” Ausberry said. “You’re supposed to be. You’re at LSU.” But free publicity alone won’t save LSU, the SEC and the rest of college sports from potential financial ruin. They need solutions to their economic reality, and Ausberry believes that two things must happen in order to fix the situation. First, he wants an antitrust exemption that would prevent the NCAA, conferences or schools from getting routinely sued in court. And secondly, he’d aim to implement a one-time transfer rule that would allow athletes to enter the portal just once before they graduated. After graduating, they’d be permitted to enter the portal again if they so choose. “And that would solve pretty much all of our problems,” Ausberry said regarding the transfer rule proposal. “… That would really help us with the transfer portal. If not, every year, you’re really re-recruiting your team (year over year), and what it does is drive the price up because you’re in a free market.” Both the antiturst exemption and the transfer rule are within the Protect College Sports Act, a bill in the United States Senate that has yet to pass. Ausberry offered his support for the bill on Wednesday, but he doesn’t fully endorse every aspect of the proposal. “We like the bill, we support the bill, the bill is good,” Ausberry said. “Do we want some amendments on the bill? We do. It would make it better for us, especially (among the) Power 4. “If we don’t get a bill, we won’t get anything. We don’t get anitrust… we just want antitrust so we can stop getting sued every 10 years.” What Ausberry did fully push up against was the idea of collective bargaining in college sports. For one, he’s unsure who the schools would specifically be bargaining with if the players unionized. And more crucially, he doesn’t believe that the players would want to bargain with the schools — even if they could unionize — because of the large sums of money they’re already making. Even Ausberry’s own kids — his older son Austin is a safety at Baylor and his younger son Jaiden plays linebacker at Notre Dame — told him that. “The kids are smart,” Ausberry said. “My kid, he does very well (financially), he said, ‘Dad why would I bargain with you?’ ” Ausberry on Wednesday was careful not to criticize the athletes for the current financial climate of college sports, noting that the rise in coaching salaries had nothing to do with the players, and that the ballooning of payments to players is the consequence of them taking advantage of a free market that was permitted by “the adults in the room.” But whether the solution to these financial problems is with collective bargaining, a bill in congress or something else, LSU and the rest of the college sports world is still facing a ticking time bomb that is set to expire at the end of the year, when football programs across the nation will begin handing out more hefty contracts to players. It’s now up to Ausberry, administrators across the nation or politicians to stop the car before it flies off the cliff. “Where do we stop this?” Ausberry said. “Where do we contain it? And that’s what we’re trying to control.”