re: LSU was snake-bitten last year.

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Miami? Notre Dame? Ohio State?

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Miami = 2004 - 5 season
Notre Dame = 2006 - 7 season

My comments are on the "last few years" - since the NC.

I forgot Georgia Tech - that was a dominant performance.

See my comments about his being a "big game coach."

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Miami didn't even want to be there. ND was a sham, And OSU was slow as shite.

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amazing..

Good post. I am a negatiger but also a realist. The points you make are all well taken, we did not have our share of good luck last year. That being said, good teams find a way to overcome their luck. It all starts with talent, leadership, coaching, and strategizing. We are in sore need of leadership from the players on this team, and Les Miles is severely lacking in leadership qualities as a coach. Moreover, Les has severe deficiencies when it comes to strategy, play calling and choosing the right weapons on the field.

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Bad weather against Penn State. That field played right into the hands of Penn State. It negated our speed and quickness, and let Penn State use their size.

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I was at that game, and the truth is the fastest players on the field were PSU's QB and two RBs. Maybe they had more experience playing in cold weather, but they handles the field a lot better than our offense did.

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the fact remains that frank incompentence remains in a (head)coaching capacity.

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Clearly that is not a fact but rather an assertion of subjective opinion. But it does make me wonder (in the vein of my earlier unanswered question):

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i truly hope you are right and i am wrong!

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What would make you believe that you are in fact wrong? Miles has already won a National Championship, so clearly success as a head coach is not enough to dissuade you from your opinion. He has won big and huge games with gutsy, savvy calls (most notably, Florida '07), so excellent game management and decision making are not enough to convince you. I wonder if you could lay our some objective, measurable criteria that could occur to actually convince you that you are wrong?

(this question also applies to any Miles-basher with at least enough intelligence/guts to admit there is a possibility they could be wrong)

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Life isn't static, people don't stay the same way all of the time.

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Much like our situations at QB and o-line....which i believe had more to do with the last two years than supposedly Miles all of sudden becoming a shitty coach.

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it's amazing how he's managed to win so many games.

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so you're saying that last year he impressed you with his clock management and our organization on gameday? you're kidding yourself. i like him but come on. i know he won a championship and i don't give saban all the credit bc he probably wasn't on the phone with saban every night asking him what to do.

it'll take a lot this year to get him back into the good graces of the majority of the fanbase. throwing JJ under the bus was unacceptable after the Ole Piss debacle, which was just a huge embarrassment for LSU

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He was behaving "mostly" as a good coach, until he "got paid". Then his performance has dropped off considerably

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Does this mean you think he was a good coach in 2005 or 2006 or 2007, but became a bad coach in 2008 & 2009?

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Not sure why that's so hard to understand, sometimes people try harder or perform better, even within a small timeframe. Life isn't static, people don't stay the same way all of the time.

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Does this mean that you think Miles is a really good coach who quit trying the last couple of years?

I really want to understand the thought process here. I feel like the people bashing Miles at present would be watching Derek Jeter bat and decide that he's a bad hitter every time he strikes out, then decide that he has become a good hitter the next time he gets a hit, then decide he has become a bad hitter again when he strikes out again, etc.

For myself, I find it nearly inexplicable for a coach to be a bad coach one year, a good coach the next year, a bad coach the next year, etc., etc. I would assume that most coaches go through a general period of improvement early in their career as they gain maturity and experience, and usually suffer somewhat of a dropoff period late in their lives (if they coach that long) due to the effects of aging, or burnout, or similar long-term conditions. The notion that a coach was excellent one year, then horrible the next year, then good the following year seems nonsensical. If a team with the same coach goes 12-1, 8-5, 11-2, 10-3, 7-6 and 13-0, that would not suggest at all to me that the coach was any better or worse of a coach during any of those seasons, but rather that he was a good coach that tended towards significant inconsistency, probably as a result of risky decisionmaking that happened to work out for the best some years, and blew up in his face in other years.

agree

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Does this mean you think he was a good coach in 2005 or 2006 or 2007, but became a bad coach in 2008 & 2009?

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Have you never heard of in sports, a team, a coach, a player getting fat and happy after a championship season and getting lots of money? Are you seriously questioning that this ever happens? He was a good (not great) coach early on at LSU who had the benefit of some great players that had been "coached up" to be leaders, he also had the fortune of good luck and some good breaks, but even more importantly, he had balls and moxie and his team fed off of his confidence.

Now, not so much.

Did he lose confidence? I don't know
Did he quit trying as hard? I don't know
Did he make some bad decisions? Yes
Did he neglect to properly coach the players? Yes
Did he hire poor assistants and not punish them? Yes
Did he act like a leader? No
Did he prepare for games? No

You're skewed notion of "bad" or "good" implies that somehow that coach went through some radical personality transformation from year to year causing him to be bad one moment and good another- almost as if he forgot everything he learned and started over each year with a fresh slate of information. I'm saying that after he won it all, for some reason he made bad decisions the last two years, and and behaved (unlike the years before) in a way that was detrimental to his team.