BATON ROUGE — Referring to the issue as the “elephant in the room,” Wade Rousse on Tuesday told the Louisiana Board of Regents this week that LSU’s Athletic Department was facing a $26 million deficit for the current year.

During Tuesday’s Board of Regents FY27 budget meeting, Rousse told the board that athletics, nationally, were in an unsustainable state, which is reflected locally by LSU. In the past six years, the school’s athletics department has overspent by $177.5 million—as compared to the $6 million in overspending reported for the previous six-year period.

Contributing factors to the recent increase in spending include coaching changes and the NIL payouts.

“We are anticipating a $26 million deficit in the current year—that is not acceptable,” Rousse said.

He says that school administrators have been working diligently to put together a creative way to monetize university assets that have not been monetized previously. While declining to discuss particulars of that deal, Rousse said an announcement should be coming in the following weeks as the school finishes its valuation model.

“We want to make sure that our brand is valued the right way,” Rousse said. “We remain total control over the entity we’re putting in place that gives us the opportunity to not only fix our short-term needs, but also we think generate alternative revenue well into the future after we’re all dead and gone that allows us to vertically integrate some of the services within our system and keep those profits within our system.”

Those funds will not be siloed to athletics either, though they will be initially used to address the “immediate bleeding” of the athletic department, he said.

“If we do this thing right,” Rousse said, “it could truly help fund the university in a way that’s better funded than it is today.”

Rousse said school administrators would be sharing more details with the Board of Regents soon.