This time it wasn’t Miles who suffered brain Freeze

Published 9:57 am Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Four sunrises have come and gone since the events Saturday night in Tiger Stadium, and in the wake of LSU’s 10-7 upset of Ole Miss, it’s refreshing, if somewhat puzzling, that the state of Mississippi’s Internet service has not yet exploded like the Hindenburg.

There is the one YouTube classic with a young Rebel lass throwing a milk carton-pounding tantrum, but otherwise mostly just quiet disappointment from the neighbors.

One can only imagine if the situation was as reversed as the roles LSU and Ole Miss played this most recent Saturday night.

However, maybe the funniest theory I’ve seen floated out there is the notion that, the final minute aside, the Rebels were most guilty of “letting LSU hang around” long enough to pull off the upset and basically derail their dream season.

I must have been at a different game.

What I thought I saw was LSU coming pretty close to, if not dominating, then certainly controlling the game from start to finish, finally holding on to the ball long enough to get its just reward.

Speaking of which, have you ever noticed that, in situations like this, the team with the four turnovers will blame it on “giving the ball away four times” while the beneficiary will pound its chest over its defense “forcing four turnovers?”

So it’s all a matter of perspective.

But we’re getting sidetracked.

Anyway, the better team on that night definitely won, no matter who still has the better body of work. It happens, even if it’s absolutely true, that Ole Miss had every right to expect to steal the game at the end.

Instead, the Rebels had a pretty good, old-fashioned meltdown.

Nine seconds left. Now he’s kicking, settle for OT — oops, 5-yard delay of game penalty — now, kick it from 5 yards back and — OK, there’s the customary LSU time out to “ice” the kicker; that never works — so line up again and …

Wait a minute. Is that the offense back on the field now? What the Hotty Toddy’s going on here? It looks like, OK, get 5-7 more yards for the kick, if not, no harm down, and … omigosh, is he REALLY throwing toward that very crowded end zone?

Thank you very much, said LSUs Ronald Martin, who performed, with relative aplomb, the kind of easy interception the Tigers had been playing hot potato with all night.

Not sure you could claim that LSU forced that one as much as Ole Miss’ Bo “Bad” Wallace put it right in his hands.

It was all very confusing, a bit awkward, convoluted and puzzling, and yet somehow Les Miles on the LSU sideline was basically an innocent bystander.

Other than calling the ice-the-kicker timeout, which had the added bonus of giving Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze time to outthink himself, there wasn’t much Miles could do but that odd hand clap of his.

He won another one with that cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.

LSU has an open date to enjoy it and Ole Miss, apparently, has gotten on with the business of hosting the Auburns this week.

Freeze has been questioned often about the questionable antics and sideline indecision, and mostly for putting the game — the season? —into the hands of a rascal quarterback prone to tomfoolery.

But it’s not like the lynch mob has formed outside his office. No “Brain Freeze” headlines.

So far Freeze’s best and most delicate explanation has been that he “needs to do a better job communicating with the quarterback about what we want.” Which can be loosely translated from coach-speak to: “I wish I could wring his neck right now.”

There has been little mention, oddly, of how you get a delay penalty for potential winning field goal which, really, is what set the chain reaction in motion.

But that’s his problem and he seems to be getting off light.

Good gracious, can you only imagine if it was Miles who had been a party to all of that? The firestorm in Louisiana wouldn’t even have reached its peak yet.

Miles needs to find out what kind of honeymoon clause Freeze has in his contract.

Seriously. Think about it.

Give LSU a 7-0 record, national aspirations, playing a down-on-its-luck rival with fans assuming victory. Let the same stutter-stepping sideline management that Ole Miss muddled through at the end play out with Miles in charge.

Oh, the carnage.

Cue up the time-management jokes. He’d be wearing the biggest dunce cap big enough to fit Dumbo — Mad Hat this! Buy the man a pocket watch. KICK the field goal!

Remember Oxford in 2009?

LSU faced a far more desperate situation in trying to steal that game from the Rebels.

LSU was almost in the same spot, the 32-yard line, and should have run safe and kicked the winner. But the Tigers passed and got sacked out field-goal range — clock running — and then completed a Hail Mary to the 2-yard line, but nobody knew whether to get the field goal team out there or spike the ball so they compromised and spiked the danged thing just as time expired.

I even coined a word for it, my contribution to the English language: “Clusterfusion.”

Sadly, it still hasn’t entered the mainstream yet, but Miles can just as easily get blasted for games he wins, which is convenient for the witch hunts since that’s what he mostly does.

The Tennessee fiasco of 2010 has never been properly explained, but Miles still gets blamed for the fact that LSU still has to apologize that for that 16-14 victory.

So it must have been heartwarming for him Saturday night to sit there calmly and watch the other sideline implode.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com(Associated Press)

Thomas Graning