There’s gotta be a place for Miles

Published 5:30 am Friday, January 13, 2017

Somehow, I can’t imagine a wearied Les Miles desperately poring through the help-wanted section, circling one offering here, double-reading another one there.

At least, I don’t want to imagine it.

It just doesn’t seem right.

But it also doesn’t seem like he’s able to get a call-back lately.

Not to worry. That big, adventurous family of his won’t be missing any meals. The famed family vacation — his stories of which always entertained the folks at SEC football media days in July — won’t have to cut back much.

LSU is paying him handsomely not to coach.

Maybe something will turn up.

Still, it’s hard to imagine there’s no place in college football for The Mad Hatter.

As much fun as most of that ride was, that place wasn’t LSU, not at the end at least.

Maybe his time at LSU was done. OK, it was.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — after he survived his near firing the previous year, when his 2016 Tigers debuted and it was obvious that there had been no real offensive upgrades, his days at LSU were numbered.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t been warned — that bizarre Texas A&M game was an out-of-body experience, an uplifting “This is Your Life” production — and the aftermath proved he really could be stubborn.

But it shouldn’t have made him radioactive.

This is a scandal-free head coach with a national championship on his r?sum? along with another appearance in the title game, by percentage the winningest coach at a school always in the national discussion.

Even the LSU fans who thought his act with the Tigers had grown stale wished him well.

And how can you not pull for Les Miles?

He’s a good guy, lovable almost. He can mangle the English language, but he’ll never embarrass you.

Nobody ever said he couldn’t coach — for years he was more appreciated outside of Louisiana than from within.

He can get a bit goofy for some tastes, but he obviously knows how to run a program.

Yet, no takers.

Again, it’s hard to feel too sorry for him.

Miles’ buyout from LSU is reportedly $9.6 million, paid out in monthly instalments over six years.

Not a bad parachute, certainly enough to make ends meet.

Any new salary he makes is subtracted from that total that LSU owes him, and part of the fine print in that deal is that he must actively seek employment in his chosen vocation.

LSU’s lawyers and accountants surely can’t say he hasn’t given that clause the ol’ college try.

There have been 17 vacancies at Power Five schools that opened and filled since the end of the season.

Miles didn’t interview for every one of them, it just seemed like it.

So far … nothing.

But he keeps plugging away, even to the point of standing in some unemployment lines that some coaches of his stature would think beneath them.

Instead, optimistic as ever, he makes it no secret that he wants to coach again.

You almost expect to see that trademark wink, although I never could figure out what it really meant.

In his few public statements during the season since his firing, he did suggest that he’d seen the light. He was, he said, spending his downtime studying fancy offenses and whiz-kid coordinators, all with an eye on staffing for his new post.

It was predictable Miles class last week when, at Jamal Adams’ request, he showed up on campus for the strong safety’s NFL announcement.

He spoke with reporters about his turn-downs.

“I met some really nice people, saw some great schools,” he said. “But I got to spend more time with my family than I have. I’ve enjoyed that as well.”

Maybe the Mad Hatter is too complex to comprehend in a one-day interview. Maybe these schools needed an interpreter to fully understand Miles as we finally did in Louisiana.

“You can’t put it in a two-hour interview,” Miles said. “It’s impossible to try. You do the best you can.”

When Gerry DiNardo was fired at LSU in 1999, he was seriously interested in the vacant McNeese head coaching job — that is, until he didn’t like the layers of politics involved at the time.

Maybe Miles has had to set his sights a little lower, at least to the Group of Five schools. Western Michigan is the latest opening where his name has been mentioned.

He’s a well-known Michigan Man, but a Directional Michigan Man?

“There are a number of great jobs out there and I’m not limiting myself,” Miles said last week at Adams’ gala before the WMU job was open. “But I do want the opportunity to build and stay there some time. And I want to win championships. It’s pretty simple.”

Maybe the hesitancy is the notion that if he could get run off from LSU, with the Tigers’ talent and resources, what chance would he have with a lesser job?

And, in the end, he did get fired.

But I’m having trouble believing that there are 17 coaches in college better than Miles.

Somebody put this man to work.