HOOVER, Ala. — It is hard not to smile at Les Miles.
This is not about game time, especially when he’s trying to run the score up on the Arkansas Razorbacks, but any time he has a microphone in front of him.
The LSU coach tries so hard to sound like he has a huge vocabulary, but when it comes down to it, he’s homey, he’s funny (maybe not always intentionally) and he’s sincere.
Maybe it is the sincere part that gets his players to play so hard for him. If you throw out the last Bowl Championship Series Championship Game, it’s hard to find a game when his players ever gave up last season.
Yes, his sideline management has hurt them.
His clock management has cost them.
Outside of that last game with Alabama, his kids take the field with confidence, energy and desire.
He may not have topped John L. Smith, Arkansas’ interim head coach who won the battle of the news conferences, but Miles might have been second.
It’s hard to not like a coach whose response to a question about a commercial he did with Mike the Tiger was: “The lines were narrowed so that I could perform them effectively.”
Then he added: “I really thought that Mike the Tiger stole the show. We didn’t get along on the set. He was kind of working the camera. It was a difficult time.”
He said that with a self-effacing smile.
When asked if he had watched the video of the BCS loss to Alabama, he replied: “To be honest, there wasn’t that many plays for us on offense.”
LSU had five first downs and 92 yards of offense in the 21-0 loss.
Critics quickly jumped on Miles when he admitted LSU’s staff didn’t tinker with anything leading up to the game.
Just saying, usually when you have a few extra weeks to prepare for a bowl and your opponent has a season’s worth of video to review, some coaches add a wrinkle here or there.
Like Nick Saban did with passes that rendered Tyrann “Honey Badger” Mathieu almost useless as the footballs dropped just beyond his coverage.
Who would have ever guessed Saban would go at the defensive back who had been in New York as a finalist for the Heisman Trophy?
Still, LSU was in the title game, and Miles won a BCS championship in 2003. Admittedly, he did it mostly with the recruits Saban left behind, but there hasn’t exactly been a big drop-off since Miles arrived at LSU.
The Tigers are 75-18 under his direction and 5-2 in bowls.
Yes, Miles seems to get tongue-tied sometimes when he is trying too hard to push the envelope and his sentences don’t always make sense.
If they did, there would not be a website called thequotablelesmiles.com.
The Tigers are going to be very good again this season. The media voted them to win the SEC.
They return 13 starters and quarterback Zach Mettenberger, who came from Butler (Kan.) Community College after being kicked off Georgia’s team. He pled guilty in 2010 to two counts of misdemeanor sexual battery (he fondled a female in a bar).
At the recent Manning Quarterback Camp, sources say, he and Tyler Wilson were the best passers.
Mettenberger, who redshirted last season, was selected by Miles as one of the three players to attend SEC media days. Most coaches might not have taken a chance on a player with a troubled past who hasn’t yet taken a snap with the team in a game, but Miles is not like most coaches.
He can get his words twisted, lose track of the clock ticking down to zero or call a timeout at the wrong time, but in the end his players play hard for him, he has a good graduation record and he wins most of the time.
And he can make you smile, sometimes without trying.
Sports, Pages 19 on 07/20/2012