Miles says patience has no place with LSU football
Published 5:52 pm Wednesday, June 20, 2018
<p class="p1">Gosh, if Les Miles didn’t exist, we’d have to invent one.
<p class="p1">If the former LSU coach hadn’t hung around Baton Rouge after the awkward and unfortunate banishment, we’d have had to have built another one from scratch.
<p class="p1">He just may be our state’s crown jewel, transplanted or not.
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<p class="p1">Oh, yes, the Mad Hatter is back in the news, which actually isn’t that hard during these dog days of a slow summer news day — i.e., a time bereft of any real football — what with the social media police always on standby alert for any little nugget that can be twisted, discombobulated and escalated into a clickable exaggeration.
<p class="p1">Miles probably meant no harm.
<p class="p1">But that will be up to the Twittersphere to decide.
<p class="p1">The conclusion, best I could tell, was that Miles perhaps might have somewhat sort of taken a veiled shot, maybe inadvertently (or perhaps not?), at his full-blooded Cajun successor, the right honorable Ed Orgeron.
<p class="p1">It’s complicated, of course, as things tend to get when you combine the always-volatile mixture of Les Miles and the English language.
<p class="p1">But it’s always entertaining when Miles gets his syntaxes and adverbs in a hangman’s noose only to have a few stray adjectives slip the headlock and emerge publicly as newborn gibberish.
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<p class="p1">According to Miles, it all started in a barbershop, which was an early, fairly crude and gossipy version of social media, largely forgotten in an Instagram world, that probably peaked back in the days when Andy and Barney and sometimes Goober were holding forth with Floyd.
<p class="p1">Anyhow, it was in this barbershop, Miles said, that he’d first heard some patrons talking about the “patience” that might be required for this year’s LSU football team.
<p class="p1">Apparently they were taking their cues from some Orgeron comments. Probably out of context, but never mind.
<p class="p1">As luck would have it — and it sounds a little too convenient to be coincidence — shortly after that fateful haircut, Miles was invited to chat on a Houston radio station (probably another slow news day, but who am I to pass judgement?).
<p class="p1">He was asked about the appearance of lower expectations for the Fighting Tigers this season, most notably the reports out of Las Vegas that the over-under line on LSU victories this season is listed as “seven.”
<p class="p1">He didn’t hold with it.
<p class="p1">“I guess what I’m saying is that I never accepted the feeling of, hey, we need to have patience. When you say that you need to have patience, aren’t you really just saying to your team that you’re not good enough? Because I want you to know something, I never took the field with the Tigers where I didn’t think that I was absolutely going to kick somebody’s tail, and that we were the best team. Period. I never asked, hey, give me a break here.
<p class="p1">“If you need a safety net, you need not coach for the Tigers,” he continued. “The Tigers are your safety net. They are the winningest, toughest, most committed group of men I’ve ever been around.”
<p class="p1">Miles never mentioned Orgeron by name, but never mind. Twitter had itself a fine old time with it.
<p class="p1">Somebody remembered that a couple of months ago Orgeron had been quoted as begging for patience — not for the upcoming season, mind you, but specifically for the spring football game. He might have mentioned that only a fraction of the offense had been installed, with kinks still to be worked out.
<p class="p1">It turned out to be wise advise because it turned out to be a typical spring game (sloppy).
<p class="p1">From there, however, if you stared long enough you could connect the dots and determine that what Miles really meant was that Orgeron was getting his excuses in order, in advance.
<p class="p1">It’s always dangerous trying to interpret Miles, but of course that wasn’t the end of it.
<p class="p1">A Baton Rouge radio station took the baton and gave Miles another guest appearance with the chance to “clarify” his remarks.
<p class="p1">This is known in the trade as a Recipe for Disaster.
<p class="p1">When asked exactly whose reference to “patience” he was referring to … well, let’s pick up the interview.
<p class="p1">“I don’t know … just heard it around the barbershop a little bit — ‘Give them a little patience’ — Holy (unintelligible word, something like ‘Waaay-hoo’),” he said. “Lets win the first one and see if we can get the second one … I think patience … I never responded well to patience.
<p class="p1">“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know who the person is that spoke in a way that said that the Tigers need patience. (But) I’ve got to tell you, I think the Tigers really are going to be a capable and quality football team, and I think they’ll look forward to getting onto the field, period.”
<p class="p1">I hope that clears everything up.
