Les Miles is a genius

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Flashback: Les Miles Jedi Mind Trick Puts LSU in 2007 BCS Title Game
By Genius Cannon, on October 15th, 2010

Heading into the final weekend of the 2007 regular season, LSU was coming off a loss at Arkansas, it’s second loss of the year, was ranked #5, and was staring at another meaningless year, since frankly any year is meaningless if you are not playing for it all. Even LSU fan websites like AndTheValleyShook.com had given up hope and had settled on a best-case blowout opportunity against Hawaii:

We LSU fans are wildly disappointed after having controlled our national title destiny a week ago. All isn’t lost though; a win tonight gives us our first outright SEC Title since 2003, and a win in the Sugar Bowl (over, say, Hawaii?) will deliver us a second consecutive Top 5 finish. Not bad for a coach riding off into the sunset.

Miles had other plans. We’re still deconstructing 2007, but in a sport that refuses a playoff in favor of subjective sportswriters, Miles played within the rules given him and Jedi Mind Tricked the press into voting LSU into the BCS title game. Here’s what we’ve stitched together:

1. Preseason, Miles put the hex on USC, taking them out of the picture.
2. The USC stunt carried the added benefit of putting the sportswriters on notice that the SEC was the only conference that mattered, and successfully planted the seed that a BCS title game without the SEC Champion would be ludicrous.
3. Miles later introduces the “never lost in regulation” thesis, which gets picked up by everybody as their own idea, and writes LSU in at #2.
4. Miles played Michigan and Herbstreit like a Stradivarius. On December 1, 2007, the final day of the regular season, ESPN Gameday analyst Kirk Herbstreit announces Miles is gone for Michigan. Herstreit is not a loose cannon. He got his news from someone meaningful. With the stage set, Miles delivered a perfect, pithy statement that sent butterfly shutters across the country…
5. Causing both #1 Missouri and #2 West Virginia to lose. You may recall Rich Rodriguez post-game breakdown.
6. Finally, LSU had to actually beat Tennessee.
7. Completing the Jedi Mind Trick,, Miles convinces the press it was a whooping, and not a one-score game. Even though everyone can read the scoreboard. Miles after the game:
“Anybody that saw this game tonight would certainly understand that this team is arguably the finest team in the country.”
8. The AP then moves LSU up from #5 to #2, ahead of Missouri and West Virginia, but also ahead of Georgia, who didn’t play as Tennessee, despite a worse overall record, tied Georgia with 2 SEC losses including one they delivered to Georgia (Georgia and LSU did not play each other in 2007). This shift also moves the Tigers from #7 to #2 in the critical BCS standings. Here are the BCS standings on November 25, 2007, and here they are on December 2, 2007.

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