Tigers, Miles seem to have lost their Mojo

Published 11:49 am Monday, November 23, 2015

OXFORD, Miss. — If Les Miles isn’t Done Coach Walking, he sure looked the part Saturday.

It was down in the basement of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, a little room that they set aside for visiting coaches to explain the previous 60 minutes.

The Mad Hatter wasn’t there.

I don’t know who that was at the podium in the skewed LSU ball cap.

It looked vaguely like Miles. Still needed an interpreter at times. But something wasn’t there.

This guy looked beaten, maybe more so than the 21 points down that his team ended their latest escapade on against Ole Miss.

I kept waiting for the familiar defiance, a twisted, garbled explanation, maybe one of those impromptu exaggerated facial expressions sure to end up on Sports Center.

Something, anything.

Instead … nothing.

Uncle Les seemed fresh out of answers. Ideas, too.

And what he delivered came out  in a hushed monotone voice that all but rendered tape recorders useless.

He tried, vaguely, to explain Ole Miss 38, LSU 17, but everything  kept sounding like excuses, even as each was followed by “but that’s no excuse.”

That’s not Les Miles’ way.

Penalties, injuries, youth, distractions, occasional bad luck.

Those are just things every coach deals with.

A Les Miles team doesn’t worry about those things. It giggles and smirks after leaving the other guy wondering how in the world that just happened.

Some called it Blind Luck, but who needs play-calling when you’ve got Miles winking from the sideline.

For sure, whomever it was in the athletic department that ran it up the flagpole that Miles’ job really was in serious jeopardy — and it likely came straight from the top — did him and his team no favors for this trip.

But that should have been no excuse either.

On Saturday, it seemed it was the 13 penalties (not counting a few declined ones) that were LSU’s biggest bugaboo. It wasn’t the sheer number, it seemed, as much as the uncanny timing.

If Leonard Fournette’s 59-yard run on the Tigers’ first play had passed muster with the officials, yeah, who knows?

That’s just a symptom of a bigger problem with no quick answers.

You can point to an archaic offense, botched execution or an eternally clueless secondary, the distractions. You can even blame the refs (Miles almost tip-toed into that never-never land postgame).

And I don’t think Miles has lost this team. They still seem inclined to play for him, if a little short on the details of how.

But, basically, what it comes down to is that this LSU team, maybe for the first time in Miles’ 11-year tenure, looks to have lost all confidence.

That’s the shocking part.

We used to even call it the Miles Mojo, although, even after deep study, it was never fully explained.

Where did that go during the open date that was hand-crafted to fall before the Alabama game?

For all the pratfalls over the years, it seemed the team — and Miles — never lost that swagger.

Even a defeat would only seem to annoy them enough to take it out on someone.

Yet against Ole Miss, even after two embarrassing performances, the Tigers seemed to be waiting for the next penalty or blown coverage or whiffed block, whatever it took.

The Fighting Tigers were the Defeatist Tigers.

There was, if you’ve been paying attention, a familiar pattern to LSU’s third straight loss.

It’s LSU’s first three-game losing streak this century, but it was worse than that.

To find three double-digit LSU losses in a row, you have to go back to 1966, which means Curley Hallman never pulled it off.

Alabama (30-16), Arkansas (31-17), Ole Miss, they all followed the familiar script like it was a WWF production.

It’s almost uncanny.

Get off to a woeful start, get that double-digit deficit early, then a little life at the end of the half and a legitimate threat to pull one of Miles’ famed comebacks.

The big tease.

The many LSU fans who travelled to Oxford had to be shushed down by the Rebel majority when they made such a ruckus as the Tigers showed some life in the third quarter.

Then … nothing. Another mirage followed by a fourth quarter where the Tide/Hogs/Rebs decide on a final score.

It looks like it probably decided Miles’ fate.