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Miles at the wheel meant you were guaranteed 58 minutes of reliable, red-meat, Big Ten football. It also meant you got two minutes of off-the-rails Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride banditry that LSU might or might not survive.
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5. A lot of this comes back to LSU having no clue how to develop or keep a quarterback.
That was largely on Miles, an adherent of the run game, defense, and the occasional special teams escapade who won a national title with Flynn, got to another title game with something called “Jordan Jefferson/Jarrett Lee,” and then spent the better part of a half-decade sifting through transfers and busted talent. At one point in 2008, with the rest of the team stacked with NFL draft picks and blue-chip talent, Miles started a transfer from Harvard at quarterback for three games. That guy eventually transferred back to Harvard.
That’s really it. I can’t summarize this any better than: “Miles started a Harvard QB in the SEC and got away with it, then had the guy go back to Massachusetts.”
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7. His peak came during a raucous, disorderly, and supremely entertaining 2007 season, when LSU became the only two-loss team in the modern era to win a national championship. Miles’ LSU beat Florida in the best football game I have ever seen by going for it on five fourth downs; lost two hair-raising, triple-OT games vs. Arkansas and Kentucky; beat Tennessee in the SEC Championship with a backup QB; and then came home to New Orleans to rout Ohio State for the title after an inexplicable series of events that college football historians are still trying to understand. (They won’t, ever. Stop trying. 2007 is the most perfect season ever and makes absolutely no sense.
