If a Division I campus can be likened to a shiny luxury car, there is no better time for a university president to take it out for a spin and show it off to the neighbors than an eventful Saturday in the fall.

Tailgates. Marching bands. Fight songs sung by alumni and students as tens of thousands prepare to pack a stadium to support the most popular representative of their school — the football team.

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If a president is lucky, the afternoon will be framed by blue skies and those fiery red, orange and yellow shades of autumn foliage gifted by chlorophyll-deprived trees.

Participating in one of these days makes it easy to see how a school gets seduced into paying the gross domestic product of a small country to someone who helps the home team win far more than it loses. And why a governor of a football-mad state would announce that a sitting athletic director who just royally screwed up a hiring and firing will not be allowed to pick the next coach.

Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana, said he’d rather have President Trump choose Brian Kelly’s replacement at LSU than keep that decision in the hands of now-outgoing AD Scott Woodward, who gave Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal to leave Notre Dame in 2021 before ousting him only three-plus seasons later and leaving LSU to negotiate a $54 million buyout bill.

Landry also ripped Woodward, former AD at Texas A&M and now former AD at LSU, for giving Jimbo Fisher the 10-year, $75 million contract that led to a quickie extension (signed by a different AD), a predictable firing and the Rose Bowl of buyouts (the granddaddy of them all) in