Les just won me back.
by Jrlz on Nov 28, 2009 10:14 PM CST
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The one good thing about Miles' game management issues
Is that it’s the most easily fixed of any potential coaching issues. This is mainly due to it being such obvious common sense (which makes last week even worse) but it’s something he can fix and have never come back. It’d be hard to all of a sudden improve dramatically in preparation skills, recruiting, etc.
Capital One Bowl
I know that we’re probably going to the Capital One Bowl, but I would almost rather go to the Cotton. I think we’d play a better, higher ranked, and more respected Okie State team instead of a Big 10 team that will probably just be labeled as overrated if we beat them. I know the payout is bigger for the Capital One, but as far as respect for next year…and a matchup against Okie State would have a good storyline as far as Miles.
Jury's still out
At least for me. It was still an important win.
And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.
He hasn't won me back
We were outgained again in total yards, and we gave up 24 second half points to a team we had on the ropes. It’s a good, but not convincing win. We’re one Trindon Holliday special teams touchdown away from yet another November SEC loss.
Les has lost the benefit of the doubt with me. From here on out, for me personally, it’s show me results. He can win me back, but this team has underimpressed all year. Bottom line for me, next year we need to be in the SEC Championship game or we need changes in the coaching staff (and yes, that means at the top).
CHAD JONES! WOOOO!!!!
Good points
I say the jury’s still out and it would take a lot for Miles to win me over.
And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.
Yep
With both of you guys here. Last week erased the “benefit of the doubt.” This week, a win’s a win, but we were outgained and perhaps equally played by an inferior team in our own house.
I’m still happy we won, and don’t have any sort of sick feeling about it as I had, say, after the Tech game. We executed that final drive in regulation almost flawlessly – we did get the benefit of a bad call on Ridley being out of bounds when his knee was clearly down. In that situation he’s got to know that fighting for three extra yards is not nearly worth the time drain on the clock. Whatever…we were down to our seventy fifth running back by the end of the year.
All told, 9-3 is not a bad outcome this season. Bottom 15 in the nation in offense, however, is. I’m hopeful those changes will be made and we’ll see how it goes next year. No Tebow and no Mark Ingram to deal with, another year for this defense (and Jordan Jefferson perhaps under a new OC) to grow, and I’m confident Les CAN win all of us back.
by GeauxTigers on Nov 29, 2009 12:03 AM CST up reply actions
So it's not a win unless we outgain the opponent?
I guess Charlie Weis is the best coach ever.
Jrlz rhymes with Charles.
Well honestly
Prior to the final desperation drive (which i said was nearly flawless), we had exactly two sustained drives all game. Like I said, I’m happy with the win, but I think it’s more than acceptable to say that the burden is on Les to regain our faith with some complete team performances.
The bottom line is we won a home game by 3 against an unranked 7-4 SEC opponent. I don’t think that’s exactly the level we ought to demand out of this team. By Vegas standards, we’d have been the underdogs up in Ark.
Compared to last week though, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
To be honest
I doubt Miles ever ‘had’ any of you.
It sickens me how demanding and condescending our fan base has become.
A win is a win in college football these days. Ask Alabama if they are happy with a win at Auburn yesterday. A win by the way, that came courtesy of some pretty poor clock and game management at the end by Aburn-without Auburn fans pouring gas on their coach. (And yes that’s the same Auburn team we beat like a drum)
Also, does the egg bowl make our loss versus Ole Miss less acceptable our our win versus Miss St. more impressive?
Heck 9-3 would have us in the B-12, ACC or Pac-10 Title game but for LSU fans now that’s the point at wich we want to fire a coach that won a National Title just two years ago.
It took us 70+ years to win our first NC, 45 to win our second, Les Miles made sure it only took four years to win our third and frankly with an experienced JJ it could very well be that we’ll be in the hunt for our forth next year, which would be three years.
Let’s fire Miles and see if we can go back to winning them every have a century or so!
GEAUX TIGERS!!!
No
Look, I started this blog and was its only writer for the first two years of existence. Feel free to go back and read all my posts if you want, but have always defended Les, especially in the wake of the 2007 Auburn game. In fact, Matt Zemek from CFN.com actually emailed me his in-depth take on that one, heavily critical of Miles. I posted that on the site and it should still be there in the archives, and I expended plenty of words around then defending Les. In fact, as recently as the week of the Georgia game THIS YEAR, when the calls for his head were first starting from some corners of Tiger Nation, I posted comments on threads here supporting the guy. So to say Miles never ‘had’ me is completely untrue.
Again, I want to reiterate that I’m not negative on Miles now by any means. The events last week just wiped the slate clean for me, and now the burden is on him to prove that he can sustain an upper echelon program.
I understand that Arkansas is a tough game for us every year, so it’s very possible this win has us back to normal. I have no problem at all with Miles coming back next year. I’m very much in favor of that. As you’ve noted, 9-3 is nothing to be ashamed of. But I don’t think it’s at all outlandish for us to expect better than a perennial 5-3 record (or worse) in the SEC. So we’ll just have to see what happens next year.
I'm with GeauxTigers as well
I’ve been generally supportive of Miles as well, and I still think the Auburn 2007 play was a good call. I do think Miles lost track of time on that play as well and should have called timeout once Flynn took too long getting out of the huddle. Once the gameclock went below 10 seconds on that play, he should have called timeout. In the postgame interview he was apparently confused about how little time was left when that play was over (and yes, I know the clock ran 3 seconds too long).
Richard made the comment below that Miles’ tenure may be judged pre-Ole Miss 2009 and post-Ole Miss 2009. I actually hope that’s the case because it means we’ve hit the bottom of this dip and we’ll bounce back to being competitive for championships again. I fear the boundary will be the 2007 BCS Championship. Since that game, we’re 8-8 in the SEC, 1-5 in November SEC games, and we have 2 game losing streaks to Florida, Alabama, and Ole Miss. We willing needed a last minute drive and a missed OT field goal to avoid a three game losing streak to Arkansas. If he gets credit for the first three years, he has to take the blame for a team that’s underperformed for the two years since.
I sincerely want Miles to be successful. I don’t want the team to have to go through a coaching search. None of the available head coach candidates really excite me. But I’m at the point where I can’t take on faith that Miles will be able to get the team back to a consistent championship contender. That’s what I mean when I say he’s lost the benefit of the doubt with me. He can win me back, but it’s not going to be on faith or on futures. I need to see a better prepared, more consistent team than what we’ve seen for the past two years. One year is an anomaly, two is a trend, three is the baseline.
I’m certain that this will inspire another rant with from you about spoiled and disloyal fans since you don’t seem to read past the slightest criticisms of Miles. The fact is that there are many fans like me who like Miles and would be perfectly happy for him to stay another 10 years if he can return the program to consistently competitive for SEC Championships. But if he can’t, how many years of .500 SEC results are you willing to put up with before you acknowledge that the team needs a change? 3? 5? 10?
CHAD JONES! WOOOO!!!!
Well
Perhaps you aren’t one of the ones that have never given him a chance but the ‘fire Miles’ corners of our fan base have existed from the day he was hired and it really has never been good enough, no matter what he does.
And you were right about the Auburn game if you defended the call and clock management of that game because it was GREAT coaching. For people to now be pointing at that as some proof of systemic ‘management’ is atrocious.
But more as a question to you, when you say he has ‘wiped the slate clean and now has the burden of proof’ do you really mean to say that one loss, as bad as it was, ERASES 50 wins, 4 BLOWOUT Bowl wins, Top 5 recruiting average and A National Championship?
I mean really GeauxTigers, is that REALLY fair?
That’s all I’m asking.
GEAUX TIGERS!!!
The job of a big-time college football coach is to have unmitigated success..
and while that may or may not be fair, Miles has made something like $13 million coaching the Tigers for the last 5 years. Because of his time here, he can live comfortably for the rest of his life even if he never works again, and while his first 3 years were outstanding, we’ve been 17-8 in our last two seasons. That’s not exactly $3.75 million/year results, and if Miles did not want criticism for 5- and 3-loss seasons, maybe he should have turned down that big contract.
Father. Husband. Lawyer. Nerd.
by Richard Pittman on Nov 29, 2009 7:39 AM CST up reply actions
And if you think FIRING him
for those three OUTSTANDING years and then one only ‘good’ and one only ‘very good’ year by virtually anybody’s standard then you have a weighted scale that no other Elite coach is going to allow himself to be weighed on.
I don’t care about offering criticism, he deserved it and he accepted it ‘to himself’.
On the other hand, what Miles has been subjected to is hate, vitriol and ridicule worse than what we heap on hated rivals and it isn’t isolated to the bad loss over Ole Miss – I wrote my first article this year refuting the calls for his head when we were 3-0 then again before the Florida game when we were still undefeated. Moreover, MANY of our fans, and you know this to be true – have NEVER liked Miles and it wouldn’t matter how much he wins or how well he coaches. When he wins it was either Saban’s recruits or luck or the players won in spite of him, well I’m sorry you don’t have the HIGHEST winning percentage in school history by luck or any of that garbage.
Now with the loss to ole miss we’ve ‘wiped the slate clean’ meaning none of his accomplishments mean anything and if he doesn’t win EVERY game between now and another Championship then he’s an abject failure and we will boot him out on his butt.
Sorry, but the amount of money he has EARNED is irrelevant – the way we as a fan base are judging this man is wrong, unhealthy and could lead to our downfall!
GEAUX TIGERS!!!
There are people who never gave him a chance
but those people are generally not associated with this website. However, we can give him credit for his success while at the same time recognizing that it appears the program is headed in the wrong direction. I don’t know about making a change, but I think it is fairly difficult to deny the fact that the loss to Ole Miss occurred in no small part because of inexcusable lack of focus on the clock, on HIS part. It wasn’t an isolated incident. We’ve had curious and indefensible clock-management, timeout-management issues in the past. This is just the time it cost us a game. Granted, we were outplayed in the game anyway, but that’s hardly a defense of the current coaching staff.
I like Miles, and if you go through the archives, you will see a LOT of praise of Les Miles, but I think that his tenure will always be split into two eras. “Before Ole Miss 2009” and “After Ole Miss 2009”. Plus, frankly this team is fortunate to have as good of a record as it does. How many teams did we really outplay this year? Vandy, Auburn, ULL, Tulane. Anyone else? This team’s 9 wins hides some serious deficiencies in play, and next year more of those close wins may become close L’s. If that happens we may have a Georgia-like year next year.
Father. Husband. Lawyer. Nerd.
by Richard Pittman on Nov 29, 2009 8:54 AM CST up reply actions
Pittman..
He’s hopeless man. Southern Man is one who likes to hear himself talk (or type). On this blog there are all of like two posters who have flat-out called for a coaching change, but yet Southern Man feels it necessary to preach to us on every thread. Even when the focus of said thread has NOTHING to do with Les Miles (or even football for that matter). There are several Tiger blogs that are far more deserving of his exhortations than this one.
At the end of the day
I'm sorry, but...
I really resent your painting me like I’m one of the typical irrational neanderthal sports fans who thinks nothing short of a national title every season is acceptable. You seem to believe that nearly any criticism of this head coach is unacceptable, and while I admire your defending the guy when he came under UNDUE criticism, I do bristle at your insinuations that we’re all a bunch of folks who never, ever believed in the guy.
I wholly agree that 2005-2007 were outstanding seasons. But in what world do you live in in which 2008 was a ‘good’ year? 7-5 in the regular season would be a good year for, say, Mississippi State. But 3-5 in the SEC and non-conference wins over North Texas, Appalachian State, Tulane, and Troy (which required a 28-point comeback that we never should have needed in the first place) are by no means ‘good’ accomplishments for a coach getting paid nearly $4 million a year. I was totally willing to give him the mulligan on last year because he had the balls to cut Ryan Perrilloux, a move very few coaches would have made. I absolutely love having a character guy as head coach, and wouldn’t take anyone in the nation over him on that front. But it wasn’t until that debacle last week that really everything comes up for question.
I hope you understand that absent the accomplishments of 2005-2007, a head coaching performance like last week’s at Ole Miss would be grounds for a hell of a lot of coaches – especially ones at teams expected to at least contend every year – to get put right on the hot seat immediately. And as I said earlier, I don’t have him on the hot seat, and am perfectly happy to give the guy a chance to redeem himself.
by GeauxTigers on Nov 29, 2009 12:23 PM CST up reply actions
I'd say we came pretty close
to out playing or at least beating Alabama and frankly ALL teams have to win close ones, Alabama and Florida both had close calls with some of the same teams we did, it happens.
I’d say next year will probably be a great year with 2011 possibly being the best team we have ever fielded.
If you look at the stable of players we are cycling in and expecting much better QB play and frankly better line play we will be scary good.
Nobody wants to give Miles any credit for the results of the first three years, that was all luck but the last two THAT is all coaching.
No deference to having to hide/breaking in Freshmen QBs, new lines, etc…
When it was good there were ‘other’ reasons, when it is not quite as good ‘other’ reasons are NOT acceptable.
Bottom line, you can view it post OM09 if you want to but that is patently unfair and I for one think that it is a CROCK!
(As an aside, have you ever done a bad job with a case, made a stupid mistake that you probably shouldn’t have made? Does that make you a bad lawyer?)
You can point to a couple of examples (some real, some imaginary) of mistakes but his overall record is undeniable and you can’t just ‘wipe it clean’ because you got pissed off over what you consider and ‘inexcusable’ mistake.
Can’t we just ENJOY the FACT that we DID ‘finish first’ in 9 exciting contests this year and have a shot to win a top-tier bowl game for the fifth straight year to make it 10.
Geaux Tigers!!
GEAUX TIGERS!!!
Can't we just LEARN to USE the REPLY function?
People, please. We're all frightened and horny, but we can't let some killer dolphins keep us from living and scoring
by Man Mountain on Nov 29, 2009 2:27 PM CST up reply actions
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