These days you can’t do one of those silly coaches’ top-10 rankings without checking off Les Miles’ name early in the process.

He has guided his LSU team around the troubled waters of some monumental preseason distractions, barging through a challenging schedule with a tricky quarterback situation to a 10-0 record and the unanimous No. 1-ranking in America.

Nick Saban still tops most of those lists, but Miles has won two straight against the Alabama coach and is 3-2 lifetime against Saint Nick.

Times are good for Miles, who gets rave reviews for managing his players, coaches and whatever may come up during game week, all with an uncanny ability to get his troops to show up ready for blood each and every Saturday.

He chuckles away his foibles — the grass-eating habit, the silly hand clap, the odd tilt of his ball cap — which fans now embrace as part of his quirky charm.

He’s so cocksure confident that, when asked for the umpteenth time Wednesday on the Southeastern Conference coaches teleconference about LSU fans’ obsession with whether Jordan Jefferson or Jarrett Lee plays quarterback and how much, he said: “Frankly, we don’t care. At some point in time, we’re going to make the best call that we see fit.”

Later Wednesday night on his radio call-in show he wasn’t much more diplomatic when a fan called in expressing “concern” about the way he was handling the quarterbacks.

“The reality of it is that it makes no difference how you guys see it, it’s the coaches,” Miles said bluntly to the caller. “I will make those calls … without asking anyone’s permission.”

Now, that’s a guy comfortable in his own skin, on top of the world, having beaten all comers, silenced his critics and …

Could it be only two years since the Great Les Miles Clock Meltdown in Oxford, Miss.?

It’s not one Miles’ fondest memories.

Miles, though just two years removed from a national championship at the time, was wearing a dunce cap in the aftermath of that fateful day, dodging a firestorm of criticism from near and afar after Ole Miss won 25-23.

He was the butt of a lot of wristwatch jokes, caught in the middle of a firestorm of chuckling criticism from afar and stunned outrage at home. For a while the final minutes of LSU games became must-see TV for curious observers, cover-your-eyes moments for Tiger fans.

Hard to believe that was the same Miles, twisting on the hot seat, who is now getting his due as one of the nation’s top coaches.

But Saturday, when the Tigers return to the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium scene of the crime, the new and respected Les Miles will have a chance to exorcise one last demon from his résumé.

“It was very disappointing. We had the game right there in our hands and let it slip away,” LSU receiver Rueben Randle, who was a freshman at the time, remembered this week. “We got better with clock management, I know that. It’s something we work on for every game now.”

It mattered little that Ole Miss outplayed LSU and arguably deserved to win the game.

The Rebels had some hijinks of their own late in the game and gave LSU every opportunity to steal the victory late.

After the Tigers got into field goal range, there was a nationally televised outbreak of clusterfusion on the LSU sideline.

The Tigers were already well within kicker Josh Jasper’s range at the 30-yard line, yet Jordan Jefferson took a 9-yard sack on an ill-advised drop-back pass, followed by an incompletion and a screen pass that lost more yardage out of field goal range, after which the coaches inexplicably didn’t immediately use their final timeout.

So with valuable time having ticked away, when Jefferson connected with Terrence Toliver to the 5-yard line, the Tigers didn’t have time to get the field goal unit on the field or to spike the ball and stop the clock.

“I took the discredit for it,” a bewildered Miles said at the time. “I can only tell you that the management at the back end of the game was the issue. Those seconds that ticked would have certainly made a difference.”

Since then he and Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt have gone opposite directions. Miles’ teams are 22-3 since that fateful day. Ole Miss and Nutt have won one of 15 SEC games since then, and Saturday’s game will be the lame-duck Nutt’s final home game after being forced to resign last week, effective at the end of the season.

But Miles said he doesn’t like to talk about perhaps the most embarrassing loss in his seven years at LSU.

“We did a couple of things different immediately after that game,” he said this week. “There are little things you learn from every game, and certainly we learned from that one.”

Former LSU wide receiver Brandon LaFell can’t hold on to the fourth-quarter pass as Ole Miss cornerback Marshay Green swats at the ball during a game in Oxford

Rogelio V. Solis