Les Miles in Talks With Kansas to Be Head Coach

Les Miles is back, baby!

Les Miles took his buyout and immediately jumped back on the coaching carousel, landing in Lawrence, Kansas. The deal isn’t final yet, but it’s been leaked to enough people that we can confidently state that Les Miles is back in college football.

College football is simply better when Les Miles is around. We live in an era of humorless Saban clones, all trying to squeeze the last little bit of joy and poetry from the sport. Which I is better than the tyrants and criminals who don’t even have time to ape the Process, only the authoritarianism.

Instead, Les Miles is one of those guys who just gets it. College football is not just a game, it’s the pageantry, the tailgaiting, the players, the fun, the everything. Miles brings all of that to the sport, in all of his grass-eating glory.

Will he succeed at Kansas? Probably not. Kansas is the wasteland of coaching, one of the worst programs in the Power 5 conferences. But that’s not the point. Would you rather suck with some anonymous clipboard holder or would you rather take the plunge with the Most Interesting Man in College Football?

Hell, at least people are talking about Kansas football. When was the last time you did that?

But I do get a bit of a kick out of pundits speculating that there’s no possible way that Miles could win at a forlorn Big 12 program, as if he didn’t go 28-21 at Oklahoma St. His predecessor, Bob Simmons, went 30-38. In the previous eleven seasons before Miles took over as the Cowboys coach, they had one winning season, and it was four years before he took the job.

Les Miles doesn’t have to prove a thing to you or anyone else. He’s one of the great coaches of this era, and the greatest coach in LSU history. F Scott Fitzgerald claimed there are no second acts in American lives, and he may very well have been right.

But Les Miles doesn’t need a second act. This is an encore. So let’s turn down the house lights, and enjoy as he takes one final bow. He might fail at Kansas, but that doesn’t change a damn thing. His legacy is already written in stone. The only question is whether we need another tablet.