Les Miles Isn't Nick Saban, and Finally That's a Problem

There are dozens of ways to parse the potentially imminent demise of Les Miles at LSU, but nearly every single one of them converges in the same place: underneath the capacious shadow of Nick Saban. That's the way it's been since Miles arrived in Baton Rouge 11 years ago in the wake of Saban's departure from LSU for the Miami Dolphins; if Miles does wind up getting fired in the upcoming days or weeks, one of the primary reasons—if not the primary reason—will be the constant and direct measurements against Saban's tenure at Alabama. This is the comparison Miles walked into, and this is the paradigm he's been laboring within the entire time. And I guess it would be fitting if this is the comparison that brings him down, as patently crazy as it might appear.

Don't get me wrong: this would be an astounding firing in many ways, not the least of which is that LSU would have to pay a massive buyout with no guarantee of better results, whomever they wind up hiring. There is no reason to do this except out of a sense of nearsightedness and desperation, and everyone knows this is the case—including, I imagine, the people making the decision—but it seems likely to happen anyway, especially now that the cat has leapt from the bag and is crawling all over Paul Finebaum's switchboard. It is the kind of blindly impatient move that grows out of certain powerful peoples' ongoing feeling of inferiority to the coach who once spurned them, but such is life in a region of the country where football success is so intertwined with community identity. The memories don't die easily.

Miles currently has the top-ranked recruiting class in the country for 2016. Even amid the late swoon of this season and the Tigers' perceived underachievement during the previous three years (which included two ten-win seasons!), Miles still has a better winning percentage at LSU (77.5) than Saban (75) did. Miles's record against ranked teams is comparable to Saban's, especially when you consider what LSU had devolved into before Saban arrived, a program continually struggling to regain an identity under coaches like Mike Archer and Gerry DiNardo. Miles has won a national championship and played for another national championship—losing that one, of course, to Saban—which is a track record few other coaches can boast of. Perhaps most important, Miles has been the antidote to Saban's frigid seriousness. He's run a first-tier SEC program while cultivating a reputation as a capricious, grass-masticating oddball who defies the conventions of football's decision-making tree and conducts his press conferences in a unique form of iambic pentameter.

For years, this was Miles' best trait: he was willing to play the jester in this rivalry. He managed to stand toe-to-toe with Saban without being Saban; he was the sort of comic relief who could also hold his own in terms of competitiveness. Short-term, it worked brilliantly. Short-term, it often felt like Miles's unpredictable looseness, his penchant for risky trick plays and fake punts at the oddest times, would prove the foil that would eventually force Saban to question his entire world view. But there was also danger in this for Miles, in being viewed as a rabbit's foot with no coherent world view of his own, in hustling the media into believing he wasn't very smart. That danger is manifesting itself right now. Because at some point, if things go badly for long enough—or at least if they don't go as well as things are going in Alabama, as they haven't the past few seasons—people are going to say to themselves, Maybe Les Miles really isn't as smart as Nick Saban. Maybe he'll never achieve that level of consistency; maybe he'll never maximize his talent in the same way, and maybe he'll never adapt.

And this is where Miles erred. At some point, he dug his heels in and decided he was going to adapt by not really adapting, and he would live or die with the result. "I think the spread offense is a tremendous way to move the football," Miles said earlier this season. "I have no problem with it whatsoever. It's just a piece of something that we do. But we enjoy the fact that there is a physicality to the offense that we run, that we're going to challenge a defense and try to control the line of scrimmage and block them. And it's not necessarily a pass-only event, and I think that that's how our offense is built. I think we'll stay there."

All around the South, coaches like Kevin Sumlin and Hugh Freeze have altered the way offense is being played; they wound up being the ones who led Saban to question his world view, threatening (but not toppling) Saban's recruiting empire with the enticement of a more exciting of play. Miles tried to incorporate a few of these elements but largely held firm to a philosophy of run-first conservatism, which is an odd way to play it from a coach who made his name by taking wild risks. Saban has opened up to the offensive revolution, most notably by hiring Lane Kiffin, which meant as soon as things fell apart for the Tigers in terms of national championship aspirations this season—as soon as their reliance on the brilliance of Leonard Fournette became a liability rather than a strength, particularly in a loss to Alabama, LSU's fifth straight to the Tide since 2012—the notion was going to be that Miles had missed the boat. That he was out of touch. That maybe Miles had been fooling us this whole time, and he was finally being exposed.

Miles didn't say much of anything when asked about his future yesterday during his weekly press conference. "I'm gonna go to work," Miles said, and he brought up the rumors that, nine years ago, had him all but gone for the job at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. At this point, maybe he's better off going elsewhere, maybe even to a place like USC, to a Pac-12 program that might be more receptive to his rampant oddness, to a place where he can establish his own identity without his fate being linked directly to one of the greatest college football coaches of all time.

Perhaps the people who pull the strings at LSU have a plan here; maybe the rumors that they'll be able to lure away Florida State head coach (and former LSU assistant) Jimbo Fisher are true. Whoever winds up getting the LSU job will still be measured up against Saban in every conceivable manner. The best thing about Miles was he actually made that seem like a manageable task—at least until he couldn't.