re: initial reaction to the ending of LSU-Tennessee 2010 aka the Miracle in Baton Rouge

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Some men just want to watch the world burn. Others set it on fire accidentally and call their friends to come over and watch. Les Miles is both.

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You know a classic piece of live football atrocity when the highlight film begins with a converted 4th and 14, especially when it's against a Tennessee team that has no business being in the game in the first place, a Tennessee team playing a lawn chair at center, a Tennessee team with linebackers whose ACLs explode for no reason, a Tennessee team whose depth chart just reads "NOPE" at no fewer than seven major positions. Tennessee's there, and like a novice climber stranded in the death zone on Everest, you know it's a matter of time before they run out of oxygen, take off their clothes, and begin rolling in the snow like dying men suffering from mountain madness and cerebral edema.

Tennessee's already doomed in theory as the inferior team late in the game even on basic football princlples before you activate the computer worm capable of crippling the entire football matrix as we know it: Les Miles.

Jarrett Lee throws a pass into triple coverage to start the sequence. Jarrett Lee, he of the multiple pick sixes and benching two years ago. He's back, and that's how bad LSU's offense is at this point with Jordan Jefferson attempting to "make pass go that way into hands." They now use him as a kind of running quarterback, which he's not. That would be Russell Shepherd, who is now a wide receiver who never gets the ball. Jordan Jefferson, the non-running QB, scored LSU's only TD to this point in the game on a wholly uncontested 83 yard run through the gut of the Tennessee defense. You knew the demons were in charge of this game from this play forward, and also that when you run on offense as nonsensically as LSU does, the only logical cure is to face an equally nonsensical defense. Tennessee rose to that challenge, and we toast you for this, Volunteers.

LSU gets the ball on the two as a result of a pass interference penalty (natch) and does what any good coach would do with three downs and a running clock with 32 seconds left in the game: call a quarterback sweep with your non-running running quarterback. Like much of Dangermouse and Cee-Lo's work together, the matchup of Gary Crowton's playcalling and Les Miles' attitude makes for sometimes nonsensical but always disturbing, affecting work.

The clock runs. You do two things when you might want to stop the clock on the goal-line down 14-10 with a running clock. You may spike it---wait, that's not happening. There's a thing about spiking the ball at LSU, if you'll recall. They could call time out, but they have no timeouts because Les Miles is pretty sure the federal government demands those back at the end of the year if you don't spend them all. Though they've been on the two yard line ever since the pass interference penalty, the LSU offensive staff suddenly remembers OH MY GOD WE HAVE A GOAL LINE PACKAGE and sets off a fire drill the People's Republic of China would call "disgracefully hurried and chaotic."

Huge men sprint off the field and onto it. The clock winds. Les Miles is seen throwing live chickens onto the field. Who knows where he got them, but they're all part of the plan now. The LSU sideline's complete anarchy triggers a disproportionate reaction on the Tennessee sideline. They send off three men, put in four, and one of the three sent off rushes back onto the field like a child terrified of missing the school bus for a field trip. (This child then ends up in the wrong town because they got on the wrong bus.) Derek Dooley wraps the headset cord around his neck and attempts to choke himself to death rather than watch what's happening. The crowd silences itself by placing a eighty thousand bourbon bottles in eighty thousand mouths at once and draining them simultaneously.

Then the most magnificent part of the play happens. This sentence appears in its own box because everything about it is spectacular:

Then the ball is snapped with the game on the line between two major college football powers with one team having 13 men on the field and another with a non-running running quarterback who watches in horror as the ball is snapped over his head and covered for a game-ending busted play. THIS ALL HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE.

Competence is overrated as a form of entertainment while incompetence can be side-splitting stuff. I watched this in a bar full of people in Tuscaloosa, and the reactions were giddy not because of any real mass hatred toward both teams, but because they knew that with a quality arsonist like Miles on the sidelines something was getting set on fire: LSU, Tennessee, or possibly both. Oh, and LSU scored on the next play when a penalty was called on Tennessee for too many men on the field because a 9-4 defense is effective but highly illegal, and Tennessee players started weeping on the field.

I'm applauding, all of you, as loud and as hard as I can in your general directions. We shall not see another ending to match this beautiful hatchet job until next week when LSU beats Florida at home 7.5 to 2 on a blocked extra point and a half a point awarded for hitting all three crossbars on a single missed FG attempt. It's in the rulebook, look it up.

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I cannot figure Les Miles out, and I'm not just referring to his press conferences that sound like he's reading a speech he wrote with refrigerator magnets. There's luck, there's dumb luck, and then there's swimming with sharks wearing a ribeye loincloth and somehow emerging untouched and having found that diamond ring you thought you lost a couple years ago.

It must be terrifying coaching against him, because the only thing you can be sure of is that no matter how many stupid decisions are made during the game, at the end he's still going to have a chance to win it, and history shows that his chances are better than yours. Rather than fire him, I think Joe Alleva needs to move Miles' office into a chemistry lab somewhere on campus. Sure, the building will burn to the ground within the first week, but you know the ashes will mix with chemicals there to form the cure for cancer.

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There's luck, there's dumb luck, and then there's swimming with sharks wearing a ribeye loincloth and somehow emerging untouched and having found that diamond ring you thought you lost a couple years ago.

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the miracle in Baton Rouge

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