Cancel Jim Bernhard's sorta sub-contract thingy

This wide ranging scandal at LSU involving systemic sexual misconduct and institutional cover-up is  pretty shocking. 

The 150-page report from law firm Husch Blackwell, which includes 100 additional pages of exhibits, is a damning indictment of LSU’s many failures in protecting its students.

Among its three key findings: LSU did not follow federal laws, best practices or even its own policies in cases of reported sexual misconduct; LSU’s athletic department incidents were not properly reported; and LSU has never appropriately staffed its Title IX office, which investigates such allegations.

Interim LSU President Tom Galligan released the report Friday to the LSU board of supervisors, describing it as “hard to hear and even harder to read” and pledging to right the many wrongs it illuminated. Galligan placed two athletic department employees on brief unpaid suspensions Friday, and he said LSU would adopt all 17 recommendations in the Husch Blackwell report.

The blame here goes all the way to the top.  Among the worst actors are former head football coach Les Miles and university administrators who tried to keep his actions quiet. It appears as though the institutional policy was to suppress any and every suggestion of sexual harassment or violence associated with the program.  

The Husch Blackwell report took a deep look at several incidents, including how LSU handled reports of sexual assaults from former star running back Derrius Guice, domestic violence from former wide receiver Drake Davis, reports of sexual harassment by Miles and dozens of other complaints involving other students and athletes.

In some cases, LSU took great pains to keep the bad behavior secret. When LSU engaged the local law firm Taylor Porter to conduct a sexual harassment investigation into Miles in 2013, for example, the university kept no file on the investigation and intentionally stored it off-site, Husch Blackwell found.

One example not cited in today's article was the subject of another report back in November. Multi-gagillionaire and LSU booster Jim Berhard played a major role in these cover-ups.  

When LSU Police investigated allegations in 2018 that a football player was abusing the tennis player he was dating, multiple witnesses told officers they were afraid of coming forward because they feared repercussions from influential Baton Rouge businessman and Democratic political donor Jim Bernhard.

Bernhard is mentioned by name in seven separate instances in police reports about former LSU wide receiver Drake Davis’ abuse of LSU tennis player Jade Lewis, who has recently spoken out publicly for the first time. Bernhard, the wealthy chief executive officer of Bernhard Capital Partners and former CEO of the Fortune 500 contracting firm known as The Shaw Group, took in Davis when he was growing up and helped raise him.

Had the university taken any of these multiple scandals as seriously as it claims to be taking them now, it would have cut ties with Bernhard a long time ago.  Instead, just last month, it announced a deal (cut in secret) to grant his company a lucrative piece of a major facilities contract.    

The LSU Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to split an $810 million energy deal between two contractors, Enwave Energy Corp. and a joint venture that includes Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard and the national firm Johnson Controls Inc.

The LSU board did not disclose the price of the deal during the meeting, but LSU officials confirmed it afterward. The agreement calls for the university to pay Enwave $27 million per year over the next three decades. How much money Enwave makes off the deal will fluctuate annually based on natural gas prices and the price of the energy Enwave produces for LSU, said LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard.

Enwave will pay Louisiana Energy Partners — the name of the joint venture between Bernhard LLC and Johnson Controls — directly, instead of LSU paying both entities, Ballard said.

Prior to the deal, the Bernhard group and Enwave had been competitors for the whole contract. Bernhard was so intent on getting it, in fact, he had to turn down a position he figured he had already purchased. 

Two months before LSU started negotiating with Bernhard and Enwave, Gov. John Bel Edwards offered Jim Bernhard an appointment to the LSU Board of Supervisors. But Bernhard, a major supporter of the governor and political donor to the Democratic Party, turned down the seat without explanation.

Sitting on the LSU board would have prohibited him from doing business directly with the university.

That bit about "doing business directly with the university" is interesting. It raises the question as to whether Bernhard's arrangement to be paid by Enwave leaves the door open for him to take that Board of Supervisors' seat after all.  

It's clear he expects the Governor owes him. People with even longer memories will recall that there had been rumblings in 2019 that Bernhard was considering challenging John Bel for reelection that year. But it turned out that those ambitions were sated by... another massive state contract.  

Louisiana will enter into a complex agreement that could lead to the widespread privatization of energy systems at state agencies and universities throughout the state, after lawmakers reviewed the deal for a final time Tuesday.

Gov. John Bel Edwards' administration struck the deal with LA Energy Partners, a joint venture between Johnson Controls Inc. and Bernhard Energy Solutions, one of several companies controlled by Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard.

And now, of course, comes the LSU deal and.. maybe still the possibility of a seat on the board.  All of this for one of the worst enablers of a system of abuse that runs through the entirety of the school administration and athletic department. If no action is taken against Bernhard now, what does that say about LSU's commitment to putting any of this right?  What, in fact, does it say about the Governor's responsibility as well?

Your funeral, guys

If you want to scare away all of your recruits and set the program back a decade or maybe more, by all means, go right ahead and overreact to four football games.  Hope that makes you feel better.

Les really doesn't have to go

It's remarkable how certain some people are that this definitely has to be the end for Les Miles. There is not decent reason to think so. Or, at least, the situation is no different this year than it was last year. People were looking at this LSU-Auburn game as a win-or-be-fired situation for both coaches. But, given the way it ended, you may as well just flip a coin. Firing someone on the basis of that outcome seems absurd.

Anyway, we talked about the possible ramifications of this game and several others when we recorded the fake radio show on Thursday. Here is that. The Governor is also on the agenda. Among other persons and things.

QOTD

Not Quite Undead Billy Cannon would not be amused.

Williams, who's the fifth-leading rusher in LSU history, gaining 2,987 yards from 1986 to 1990, didn't hold back.

"I bleed Purple and Gold, LSU is my life, man," Williams said. "At the end of the day, Les Miles and Cammy-Cam (offensive coordinator Cam Cameron) need to be run out of Baton Rouge, like them ol' Frankenstein movies with torches and all that. Everybody in Baton Rouge ought to light a torch.

"We sat there and watched this last year. After the third play of the (Wisconsin) game, I knew it was the same thing. It's not fair to all those kids out there. If Billy Cannon were dead right now, he'd be rolling in his grave. I feel like I'm watching the '56-'57 football team that was running like a 1920 offense."

Sounds like Harvey Williams has been watching too many horror movies.  But, man, did the knives ever come out for Les Miles quickly this year.

"Not necessarily blocked"

Y'all have to know what kind of football season this is going to be.  It's not going to be one of those big beautiful Trumpwalls of catharsis seasons where our heroes accomplish great things and leave us with joyful memories of triumph to talk about for years and years. If that's what you're expecting this year, you're only setting yourself up to be disappointed.

What's worse, if you're too let down you'll be too angry to appreciate what this football season actually is going to be about.  This is going to be a season of rake gags.



We're going to watch our heroes stumble over the same obstacle over and over until the repetition is what actually makes it funny. Here is how the rake gag works.  First, the audience is made to watch Drew Brees sacked violently or Brandon Harris throw a game-sinking pick.  Then, as the shock of of that sets in, they are made to watch it again. And then again and again until it becomes tiresome. After that, the gag continues until it somehow becomes funny again. It's a bit of a comedy cliche but, as those go, it's a pretty good one.

Sometimes it helps if we add an element to keep it fresh, though. So here is little Les Miles, age 5, avatar of human frailty, here to help us add a touch of emo to our gallows humor.

Miles credited Harris with getting out of the way, but the play ended in an interception that killed the last chance at winning the game.

"He dodged extremely well," Miles said. "He was getting sacked, pivoted out of the grasp of the defender and didn't make the throw he wanted to make. There was some difficulty getting plays in that we need some work on. It's more than a quarterback. It's a team issue."

The dodging was pretty good. LSU's team, much like the Saints, have a bit of an offensive line problem.  On Saturday, they used three different tackles to no good effect.  Even when Harris was completing passes, he never looked especially comfortable.  But that's going to be an obvious and recurring theme throughout the season.  Maybe it will get funny on its own. But until it does, at least we have deflated Les here to deadpan the descriptions.

"I really have to see the film," Miles said for the third time in his post-game interview. "It seems to me there were some guys that were not necessarily blocked. I know some guys had a heck of a day, blocked extremely well. We'll have to see how it goes.

"We didn't move the football like we are capable. At times we threw the ball well. At times we turned it over."

Some guys were not necessarily blocked. This is going to be a great season. You just have to understand now the specific way it's going to be great. Some teams will not necessarily win much. But we'll figure out how to make it fun.

But we'd better do that quickly because some especially bitter folks are already looking to make if very not fun if they can.  

Nevermind all that, then

Joe Alleva's skill at handling these situations is somewhat wanting.

LSU will retain head coach Les Miles, athletic director Joe Alleva announced Saturday after a win over Texas A&M, which included Tigers carrying Miles on their shoulders and a standing ovation from fans.

"I want to make it very clear and positive that Les Miles is our football coach and will continue to be our football coach," Alleva said. "Les and I have talked about this program. We are committed together to working to win to compete at the highest level. We're going to go forward together and win championships here at LSU."

Uh huh.  We're pretty sure it wasn't even up to you at the end of the day. What would you say, you do here, Joe? 

Miles said in a postgame presser that he learned from school president F. King Alexander that he'd be retained.

Looks like a few other folks had a hand in the decision too.

It's over

Can pretty much guarantee Les is a goner now.

As speculation swirls about Les Miles’ future at LSU, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has come out to publicly to voice his support for the head football coach.

“(Miles) is a great coach and a better man,” Jindal tweeted Saturday, just hours before LSU takes the field against Texas A&M for its final regular season game. “He is a fantastic ambassador for our state. I hope he remains our coach.”

Oh boy.  This is quite a problem to throw into the lap of the new Governor.  Not only does he have to worry about how he's going to implement Medicaid expansion or criminal justice reform, now he has to figure out what to do about the head football coach.

On the other hand, it's not too much of a stretch to assume this position serves at the Governor's pleasure.  Huey Long seemed to think so, anyway.   Huey even went so far as to have his own plays drawn up and submitted to the coaching staff. Nobody knows how Huey's play "Number 88" was supposed to work, though.

Bobby Jindal likes this one where the quarterback hands the runner a voucher which he then carries off guard toward the faith-based football provider of his choice. Last year, he tried to run a play action which involved a fake tuition hike followed by passing an equally fake tax credit to cancel it out. Not even Les Miles ever tried anything that off-the-wall.  Like most of Jindal's plays, though, it ended up being thrown for a pretty big budgetary loss.

After Les, years and years in the wilderness

With Les, LSU has a fantastic recruiter but demonstrably terrible coach who is at least nice to the kids who play for him.  By firing Les all you do for certain is lose the fantastic recruiter part of that equation.

University Lab standout and nation's no. 1 prospect in 2017 Dylan Moses spoke candidly with SEC Country's Chris Kirschner, via message, and that message could not have been more clear; he does not like what is happening to Les Miles.

The recent LSU decommitment is very familiar with Miles, after playing with his son Manny at University during his freshman and sophomore seasons. Moses told the site that Les Miles is "like a family friend" and that he "personally thinks it's wrong" that Miles is in jeopardy of losing his job right now.

Recruiting is about 90% of what it takes to succeed in college football. Les has been bad a lot of things but you can't say he hasn't been successful.  After he's gone, who knows?

Farewell Tour

Not sure Bobby Jindal has put out his tour dates just yet. Please keep us appraised if any announcements are forthcoming.

Jindal plans a statewide tour to highlight his achievements before leaving office in January. He said he hasn’t decided on his political future just yet. At 44 years old and with an impressive resume of political jobs under his belt, Jindal is certain to have an array of options.

Whether the charm offensive in his last weeks as governor will improve his reputation in Louisiana, however, remains questionable.

But Jindal isn't alone. Lots of longtime favs (and not so favs) are finishing 2015 with conspicuous exits. So if you want to follow along behind the tour, you might be riding in a crowded party bus.

We already know Rob Ryan is riding it off into the sunset of vengeance or something. 

Ryan, who acknowledged that the Saints didn’t fire him until at least four hours after the initial Fox Sports report came out Monday morning, was in California visiting his son Joe when the opportunity to make an appearance on the NFL Network arrived.

But he doesn’t plan to move into TV full-time. Despite the way things ended in New Orleans, Ryan expects to be back in coaching soon.

“The bottom line is this: I’ll hold my head high and walk out in the sunset,” Ryan said. “But believe me, I’ll come back with a vengeance.”

We also know that "Voice of the Tigers" Jim Hawthorne is walking out into the same sunset... or maybe that's Jack Hunt.

And, of course, David Vitter is going away too.

I think his legacy is two-fold: First, he did more than any other individual to make Louisiana a solidly Republican state through party building at the grass roots level, precise messaging, very successful fundraising and unrelenting criticism of the opposing party.

Second, he proved that fear, anger and intimidation are still powerful political weapons, especially in the hands of someone without a conscience, but the oldest rule in politics is still “What goes around comes around,” and if you spend an entire career fucking over people you’re supposed to work WITH, sooner or later you’re going to be hoist on your own pee-tard–probably in a very ugly and public manner

Or to put that another way, 

Vitter has spent the first half of his career criticizing adulterous liars and the second half skirting questions about being an adulterous liar. He relentlessly scapegoated gays, sounded the alarm about brown illegals and leveraged racially-charged issues.

Now these two awkward, arrogant, irritating, weird, friendless men (Vitter and Jindal) — who have been in office for so long and have accomplished so little good— go home defeated.

Or to put it still another way, David Vitter is a disgrace to humanity and will be long remembered as such.

Speaking of which, Vitter's pal and.. um.. PR professional Scott McKay is also making sounds as though he may go off a wanderin' too.

You guys already know everything I have to say on the elections this weekend, since I did seven different posts on them yesterday. We’re moving on from that. I am not sanguine about the prospects for Louisiana’s future, and frankly I’m going to be thinking about whether to include myself in it.

One imagines that is very similar to what Wendy Ellis said once that Vitter money dried up for her too. 

But wait. We may need to save some room on the bus for Les Miles.  We used to be pretty hard on Les around here. That was until a few years into the run when we made peace with his obvious flaws as a football strategist and learned to appreciate the things he does better than a great majority of college coaches.

Les is a top notch recruiter. Not only that but, once he convinces kids to play for him, he is supportive of them throughout their tenure. There have been some tough situations with some of these players, but you never see Les Miles hang anyone out to dry. He's genuinely loyal and his players seem to like playing for him. During his time at LSU, the program has developed more professional talent than any other school.

After many years of this, you'd think LSU fans and alumni would be well used to the product Les Miles delivers: Always very talented. Not particularly well organized or.. well... prepared to play fundamentally sound or smart football. But always very entertaining and successful far more often than not.  Shouldn't that be enough? If you dump that overboard, who knows what comes next?  How many Curley Hallmans will LSU fans suffer through now before they find anything close to the fun we had watching Les Miles goof off and accidentally beat people for a decade?

But more and more the rumors point us to the notion that Les is gonna be on that Farewell Tour bus with the rest of these guys.  I hope they don't let him drive.

Please don't fire Les

Not now. Not after we lost Rob Ryan. Not after we lost the Jindal 2016 campaign prematurely.  We're not ready to give up so much fun all at once. These guys are thinking differently.

OXFORD, Miss.– LSU football coach Les Miles’ future is in danger even if the Tigers win out to end the regular season, an LSU Board of Supervisors member said on Friday.

“I think if he wins the next two games, it’s still something that needs to be looked at,” LSU Board of Supervisors member Ronald Anderson told Gannett Louisiana on Friday. “It’s the way they lost the two games.”

We're all well-inured to the Les Miles act by now. He recruits well. He says and does strange things. He is generally good to his players. He develops a lot of professional talent. He doesn't manage actual football strategy particularly well.

But because recruiting and player development is at least 3/4 of the battle in college football, and because coaches who do those things well and consistently over long periods of time are extremely rare, it's probably best to just accept the imperfections (and even the outright disasters) that come along with that.  In fact, I thought this had all been settled a long time ago.

This ain't Columbus Day

You can stop that after 40 seconds if you want to. [YOU DON'T HAVE TO NOW. I FIXED IT] But vote.. you know... if you want to.

Here are some Election Day links for you.

Voter suppression is still very much in style.

The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.

The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.

What's the matter with Kansas now?

Of the various Kansas races, it is the Pat Roberts–Greg Orman Senate matchup that has captured the attention of poll-parsers and odds-makers from coast to coast, because it presents them with an alluring double uncertainty: Not only is the race itself too close to call, but if the independent Greg Orman wins, we don’t know which party he will line up with. In fact, we know remarkably little about Orman’s politics generally, because he didn’t come up by conventional partisan means; he moved sideways into public life after a successful career running a private equity firm. Over the years he has had dalliances with both R’s and D’s, and today he presents himself as an anti-politician, assailing (as he put it in a TV debate a few weeks ago) “partisans of both parties” who refuse to “roll up your sleeves [and] start solving problems.”

As races come down to the wire all over the country, it seems ever more possible that the fate of the Senate lies in the hands of this one unknown figure, who could conceivably deliver control of that august body to either side. The possibilities have beguiled the science-minded men of the consensus, who for weeks have speculated back and forth on this or that possible scenario, with the enigmatic Orman always hovering over the outcome.

Who is benefiting from the new age of unlimited money?

Republican dark money groups are outspending their Democratic counterparts by an incredible margin, according to data from the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation.

During this cycle, conservative groups that do not disclose their donors have spent more than $94 million, while liberal dark money groups have spent more than $28 million.

Does that mean the Republicans will take the Senate?

Republicans have a 76.2% chance of winning a majority.

Whose fault is this?

Oh good lord. If the Democratic Party wants to know what's wrong with the Democratic Party it isn't the "professional left" or the "emoprogs" it's the institutional Democrats who run to press and whine like infants every time the Party looks like it's about to lose an election --- even if it was entirely predictable and is completely reversible 2 years later

But, of course, everyone will blame "the liberals."  Even though "the liberals" are more likely than anyone to turn out and vote for the terrible Democratic candidates who hate them. Worry instead about the voters you haven't reached. 

BILL MOYERS: This, to me, is this fundamental question facing Bernie Sanders. How do you get your message directly to those who need it most? And you know who they are. They're conservative working people, who don't realize that their party has been sold all these years to the financial and business interests that are rigging the rules against them. How do you reach those people?

BERNIE SANDERS: Well, believe me, I wish I had the magic answer. You're asking exactly the right question. There are parts of this country, Bill, where the only information people get is on radio. You got Rush Limbaugh. 95 percent of talk radio is extreme right wing. You got Fox Television, which does an extraordinary job of deflecting attention away from the real issues.
The idea that you have these working-class people who are voting for candidates who refuse to raise the minimum wage, who refuse to provide health care for their kids, who want to send their jobs to China, who want to give tax breaks to corporations, it blows my mind. And that is the issue that we have to figure out.

BILL MOYERS: But is there no way to make a concerted effort to reach out conservative working people, people who share, I think, a populous bias in behalf of government by, and for the people. Wouldn't you bolster your credentials as someone willing to really shake things up, get beyond this distracting tedium of left and right and horserace mentalities that you're asked about all the time on the radio. Is there a way to make a campaign out of that?

BERNIE SANDERS: This is something that I'm thinking about hard. When they ask Tea Party people, and I've seen some of the polls, do you think we should cut Social Security? You know what they say overwhelmingly? No. Should you cut Medicare? No. Tea Party working-class people will be shocked to know that the people who founded the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, the concept of minimum wage. In other words, the ideology of the Koch brothers, who put the initial money in to found the Tea Party, is very different from the average, working-class person. And you're saying how do we reach out to get to work in coalition with those folks is something that we have got to do.

Here is the important point about that.  It is 100% the Democrats' own fault. Democrats lose elections like this one because they defend a half good/half bad health care law when they should be pushing for a better one. Democrats lose elections like this one because they brag about having "saved" the corrupt financial industry at a time when they should be running against income inequality.

People are angry and pretty much hopeless.  The moment calls for insurrection. But the Democrats fail to deliver that.  Meanwhile, the Republicans offer a false version of it spiked with fear and ignorance.  Maybe you think you're morally superior or whatever.. but it's hard to blame voters for either choosing the latter out of spite or tuning out altogether.

The good news is, it probably doesn't even matter who controls Congress for the next 2 years.  They don't even do anything.  Here's an amusing John Oliver segment on state legislatures, where the real.. and often terrifying... action is these days.



So, you know, remember to buy local in the future.

To that end, today's ballot (preview your sample ballot here) is full of local stuff.  In Orleans Parish, there are three city charter changes, and seventy million judicial elections to contend with on top of the fourteen proposed state constitutional amendments.  You'll probably need help navigating that stuff.  Here are some links that will help with that.

The League of Women Voters publishes a guide to all candidates, amendments, and propositions here.

This year, The Lens, spent a great deal of time focusing on the judicial races. Here is their comprehensive guide to the candidates.

Jules Bentley wrote this amusing guide to every race in Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard.  I don't necessarily agree with his recommendations, although I do admire the spirit in which he makes them.

PAR puts out, by far, the most useful of all the guides to the constitutional amendments. That document includes a detailed explanation of each along with the prevailing arguments for and against.

I tweeted out an..um.. alternate version of this explainer last night.  I've been asked to put that together in a list so sorry but here is that. 


Anyway... WHO IS GOING TO WIN?  Luckily, I know some of the answers to that too.

First of all, we have to make some Congresspersons. Obviously Cedric Richmond is well on his way to becoming District 2 Congressman For Life so there isn't much to say about that race.

This week, TPM named botth the LA-05 and LA-06 races among their list of "Six Most Interesting House Races To Watch"  Which is weird because the New York Times recently declared Louisiana politics officially uninteresting anymore.  They're probably both a little bit right.

For example, the 6th District race is absolutely nuts and pretty wide open to boot. If fate were to somehow deal us a Lenar Whitney vs Edwin Edwards runoff, it will be the sort of stuff we tell to our grandchildren.. or to Edwards' children, I guess.

Sadly this isn't going to happen. Instead, Edwards will end up in a runoff with one of the other 70 Republicans running. Judging from the bizarre run of last minute attacks against him, this will probably be Paul Dietzel But who knows?  Anyway whoever it is will beat Edwards.  So it's an interesting race but not a really interesting race.

Same thing in District 5 where the goddamned Duck Dynasty people are trying to see if they can just randomly name congressmen from now on.  Interesting because Vance McAllister won his first election running with the DD endorsement but also against Bobby Jindal's refusal to accept the Medicaid expansion. Now he's running against DD absent any issue that might actually matter to people this time around.  So it's interesting in that it might serve as a referendum on Duck Dynasty. But not for any other reason.

Anyway I think McAllister makes the runoff vs Jamie Mayo who is just kind of there as part of the furniture.

As for the local races, I don't think I can make a call on those. My guess is Sens and Marullo win.. which I'm sure will lead to much tooth gnashing.

Finally, I don't think the Louisiana race will determine the balance of power in the Senate.  The GOP path to victory looks like it comes via wins in Alaska, Iowa, Colorado, and North Carolina tonight. Many people disagree with me! Especially about North Carolina but just you watch.

There's also a slight chance that Kansas Independent Greg Ormon finds himself elected President Of Everything but I don't think that's going to happen.

The upshot is Louisiana will have a runoff to decide its Senator and that runoff won't matter to anyone at all.  Which is fine because these candidates are terrible people. This is an actual transcript of their first debate I made in case you need evidence of this.  I guessed some numbers on this earlier.. where did I put.. oh here it is.

Mary: 45%
Cassidy: 42%
Maness: 10%
Other 3%

Anyway, have fun pushing the buttons out there today.

Anticipating trouble

There are two ways to look at Les Miles's tenure as the head football coach at LSU. One is to resign yourself to the idea that one day we'll all look back on this and laugh. The other is to just start laughing now. It's been about 2 years since I decided on the latter, and I haven't regretted a moment of it.  

Tuesday, reporter Kaylee Hartung got to ride to work with Tigers’ coach Les Miles. The two talked about Miles’ daily routine — like what he eats for breakfast (Raisin Bran and fruit) — and this weekend’s matchup against the Crimson Tide. But the two biggest takeaways from the experience were 1) Les Miles doesn’t wear a seat belt, and 2) Les Miles runs red lights.

However, when Hartung confronts Miles about running the light, he denies it, saying he stopped, then anticipated the change.

The downside to this is college football is pretty unforgiving of sustained imperfection.  One or two years with 2 losses or more in a row and you may have consigned your program to a decade or more of irrelevance.  Which is why it's possible to argue that tonight's game... despite the double digit point spread... is a career defining must-win for Les Miles. 

If LSU pulls off an upset of the currently most hated team in America, they've imbued a 2 loss season with national significance. They will have burnished their reputation for general mayhem and kept pace with A&M as a relevant perennial challenger to Alabama in the SEC.   On the other hand, if they lose this one, then suddenly all the talk is about how it's been 2 years since Les Miles' career peak just moments before his perfect team was smushed by Bama in the Superdome last January. Two years is a long time to go as a second tier team with a recruiting class watching you. 

That may sound harsh but that's how college football works.  And it's why LSU fans can at least console themselves with Miles' goofiness.  If you think they're hard on him as it is, try and imagine any other mediocre coach in this situation without his personality to keep the sharks half at bay.

Les Miles and clock management is kind of an old joke

If he could go back in time, Les Miles would have liked to have saved more time. 

With more than 20 seconds left in the game, Miles said the coaches were deciding whether to run the clock down and use the timeout to ice kicker Andrew Ritter and try to block the field goal. However, Miles said with six seconds left he realized that blocking the kick was unlikely since they had already blocked a Ritter attempt earlier in the fourth quarter. At that point Miles called the timeout and said he wished he'd done so sooner.

"We've already blocked this team, we could not be in any better position to go onto the field and at that point in time I wish we could have had every one of those seconds back," Miles said at his Monday press conference. "Again, the plan was to ice and block, and we should well have, in retrospect, gone after those 20 seconds that we could have had at the end of the game."

 But, hey, now there will be plenty time to think it through.

Miles told team: "I'll internalize this and get better." #LSU
— Les East (@EastAdvocate) October 21, 2013

Like while he's at home watching one of the major bowl games this year. 

I don't think Les Miles is going to Arkansas

For one, I think that if he takes the deal, reported to be worth $27.5 million, to move to an inferior program in a smaller setting with nowhere near the recruiting base, it will mean that he cares more about money than he does football.  And we all know Les Miles is far too stupid to have his priorities in order.

Still, given all of that, Arkansas seems like a weird chip to use merely as a contract renegotiation ploy. Plus there's still the matter of what the hell was going on behind the scenes when Les freaked out after the Ole Miss game. It's possible that something's up.  But I still don't see Miles bolting for Arkansas as very plausible.

Les Miles is losing it

Today Varg recommended that we watch this entertaining video with the sound off. 



And we did. It's just as funny either way.  But it also strikes me as a disproportionately emotional.. or angry.. response to an exciting win over Ole Miss. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm willing to bet something is going on behind the scenes at LSU we don't know about yet.

We'll never see it shine*

"I like being able to fire people" --Mitt Romney

It's time to fire Les Miles. I know, I know, I'm fully aware of all that nice stuff I just said about him this year. I stand by that today but it doesn't change things. I've come around to believing that Les is a heck of a guy and, by all accounts, a better person than Nick Saban. He's humble and has a sense of humor. He treats his players with genuine respect, forgives their indiscretions and even turns them into positives. I can see why he's been such a great recruiter. Here's Les Miles' finest hour this season when he welcomed suspended quarterback Jordan Jefferson back onto the team.

"I don't think there's any question that our guys are looking forward to the return of Jefferson as a teammate, friend, skill set, what he adds to our team," Miles said.

If I'm a high school athlete worried about getting chewed up by the grinding experience of high-profile college football, I want to play for that guy. I've come to admire Miles for the way he conducts 90% of his business of being a head football coach. I also think he's incompetent.

And sometimes even that can be funny. I, like a lot of LSU fans, had certainly resigned myself to that fact over the course of these past few seasons. But this moment is different. This was a singular opportunity to crown what we should have remembered as the greatest team in the history of college football. Les not only blew that opportunity, he utterly, inexplicably, spaced out on it. Even before the loss, the fact is we've now seen Les Miles take the LSU program as far as he'll ever take it. Had LSU won, he'd have been able to coast on that forever but the coast would have been undoubtedly downhill. With the loss, he drops off a cliff. There's no getting back up the hill either way.

I appreciated Mark Moseley's Lens column on the matter. It's about as close to an attempt at consolation we're likely to receive from a non-LSU, and in fact, non-SEC fan. At the same time it comes with a few subtle implications which badly obscure the truth of the moment and so need to be countered in order for us to fully understand why it's time for Miles to go.

First of all, Moseley seems to be telling us that LSU would have been better served by playing this game against a team less capable of beating them.

I cannot stress that enough, and it’s part of why I feel LSU got a raw deal with their BCS-designated opponent. LSU already beat Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, yet their victory was discounted as a “pseudo win” because it occurred in overtime. (Miles is familiar with this shoddy argument.) That’s one of the reasons the Tide didn’t fall far in the polls and was able to creep back into the title game. LSU went 13-0, beat eight ranked teams and won the strongest division in the strongest conference in football. They deserved a title romp against a team like Oklahoma State. Instead, they drew the scariest championship opponent imaginable: a rematch with a Tide squad thirsting for revenge, guided by a genius coach with quasar-like intensity.

While it may be technically true that the Tigers would have pummeled a pretender like Oklahoma State, it wouldn't say much for the legitimacy of the title such a game would produce. A common complaint lodged against the end of many college football seasons is that the given year's so-called champion attained such status through some sneaky political dodge of a more qualified contender. When he writes that LSU "deserved a title romp against a team like Oklahoma State" Moseley appears to be arguing in favor of just such a sham match-up.

I take Les at his word when he says, “It would be an honor to play that team again," just as I thoroughly believe him when he tells us he personally was utterly unprepared for what that meant. But Moseley's suggestion that this means the Alabama players were somewhat "more determined" than the LSU players is, in the immortal words of Bobby Hebert, just ridiculous.

The cro-magnonesque argument that one sports team defeated another because it "wanted it more" is rarely true outside of Hollywood and inconceivable during a championship contest. I reject any attempt to blame the debacle on such immeasurable fluff as the "heart" or determination of the teenagers and young adults wearing the LSU colors.

Similarly, I am aware of the personal venom directed at the young man Les left in at QB all night which I also find distasteful. No, there's only one man being paid millions of dollars to stand out there and take blame and that man is Les Miles. To his great credit, Les understands his responsibility well.

I told my team I did not see it coming. And that's my fault. I wish I could have done something to help them. But for my players that worked their tails off, they started in their career to put themselves in position to win a game like that. To them I owe a lot.

The fact that now must be confronted is that what Les owes those players, he can never give them. He utterly failed them and they are frustrated by that. As are any of us who watched this team play this season.

What clearly set LSU and Alabama apart from the rest of the country by a great distance this season was their similar commitments to real, old school, grinding, physically dominating football. After a decade and a half of the prevalence of Steve Spurrier - Urban Meyer style gimmickry, seeing Alabama and LSU destroy people by playing real football again was not merely refreshing. It was an affirmation of the value of doing things the right way... of legitimately beating people at football rather than squirrelishly, cowardly skating about the outer limits of its rules like some CIA drone pilot dropping bombs on Afghans from a bunker in Nebraska.

This LSU team was chewing up America on the strength of its having restored some semblance of honor to football strategy as well as some semblance of humanity to the position of head football coach. This wasn't just a college football campaign it was a righteous crusade to stomp out evil.... sometimes, of course, by kicking it in the face.

But somehow... incredibly.. unbelievably at the very moment of reckoning, Les Miles decided, "Nope! Let's see if we can't just suddenly try and run Oregon's offense for the hell of it!" For more on this bewildering strategic departure, I suggest this critique by Deadspin's Tom Scocca.

LSU's advantage all season long was that it had waves of skilled players. On offense, the Tigers attacked with a platoon of powerful running backs, infrequently but devastatingly turning to a dangerous receiving corps, with Jefferson as a scrambling/option-pitching/throwing triple threat. When Jefferson was unavailable early in the season, second-string QB Jarrett Lee had shown the ability to run an orthodox passing game.

But given more than five weeks to draw up schemes for attacking Alabama's defense—a defense that had held LSU to two field goals in regulation the first time they met—Miles came up with nothing. Or if he did come up with something, he panicked and forgot it. His lone idea was Jefferson. Specifically, it was to try to have Jefferson attack the edges of the Alabama defense.

The trouble was, there was no edge. LSU's players couldn't outrun the Alabama defense side to side, and Jefferson's option pitches and passes to the flat weren't crisp enough to beat the defenders outside, either. By the second quarter, this was obvious. By the third quarter, it was baffling.

Not only was it baffling, it was the baffle of all baffles forever pissing away an unrecoverable moment in history. And this is the point on which I most differ with Moseley who ends his column on what looks at first like a hopeful note.

Tiger fans are profoundly disappointed with their team’s performance last night. (Trust me, I can sympathize with that feeling.) But it’s those same maddening vicissitudes that make college football so great. This season’s bitter disappointment makes for next season’s redemption: and perhaps that redemption will come during Alabama’s next visit to Baton Rouge.

And, hey, that sounds great. Nine times out of ten I'd hold that sort of counsel up in front of the whole class of whining despondent fans and say, SEE THIS, PLEASE! But not in this particular case. In fact, making such an argument here belittles and misapprehends the cosmic scale of the event. Miles could coach another 50 years and not meet with a chance to wipe away the fullness of that failure. It's insurmountable. Career defining. It will change LSU football for decades to come.

And this, more than anything, is why Les Miles should be fired. It's not that he isn't a nice guy. It's not even that, if we consider the entire package he brings as a program administrator, mentor, and leader of men, he's all that bad of a person to have running the program. It's just that there's nothing left here for him to do besides wallow in the aftermath of this disaster. LSU and Les Miles will spend the rest of their lives mourning the incalculable failure of Monday night's BCS game. It's best they part ways now and get on with the business of doing that.

Quote of the Day

"Do you have a question?"


BCS post game press conference moderator to a deranged and angry Bobby Hebert

Read this Les Miles story

After 4 or 5 days of sitting on the pilot's lap while pretending to fly the Direct TV blimp over New Orleans, today is the day Les is expected to come back down and coach the football team. I know I've already said this earlier in the season but I've come the full 180 degrees with regard to Miles as we've gotten to know him better over the years. I'd even go so far as to say the guy is my favorite football coach of all time. (I still like Bum Phillips a lot, though.) Of course most of you realize that isn't saying a whole hell of a lot given the low esteem with which I regard football coaches in general but, still, it's the thought that counts. Or actually it's shit like this.

Inside a metallic practice bubble that late-summer day, sweaty young men listen to red-faced coaches bark orders and demands. Even praise comes at excessive decibels. Miles, 58, is dressed in a gray shirt, purple shorts and his standard-issue white hat. He bears an eerie resemblance to Kurt Russell. Miles doesn't yell. He doesn't say much. He's most concerned with the ice cream man.

Or this

The seamlessness with which Miles transitioned the program from the no-nonsense, bordering-on-miserable atmosphere Saban bred to the loose, happy air that permeates LSU today is among his greatest successes. There have been setbacks. Before the Tigers' first game, nearly half the team broke curfew, including quarterback Jordan Jefferson, who police charged with felony battery for allegedly kicking a Marine in the head during a brawl. In the middle of the season, Miles suspended three more players, including Heisman Trophy candidate Tyrann Mathieu, when synthetic marijuana showed up in their urine.

"Those were things this team needed," Miles says. "It's a distraction. You can call it what you want. And it was. But there were direct, correctable steps, and they made 'em. And it was wonderful. It was fun to work with. It's been a fun year."

Only Miles can turn a bar fight into a fun time and still manage to sound sincere.

There's a lot more to that article. Elevated presentation of tear-jerky stuff and whatnot. But the main point is this. What makes Les Miles successful is the fact that he specifically lacks that quality of ego-maniacal fastidiousness so many insufferable football coaches believe they are required to possess. Football is a chaotic and often absurd activity. The conventional approach to managing it is based on beating the chaos into submission through the iron force of one's own red-faced screaming micromanaging obsessive compulsive assholery. Most coaches do it this way. Some (Nick Saban, Tom Coughlin, Bear Bryant, etc) do so with some measure of success. Others (Bobby Petrino, Jim Mora, Curley Hallman) not so much. But win or lose these coaches are undeniably major assholes. Les Miles does something different. He doesn't try to beat down the wackiness he embraces it, celebrates it even, and finds the way through it smilingly. Win or lose, this is certainly the more honest way to apprehend and react to one's environment. Here... go read the article. It's all in there.

Miles ached for football. He would talk about it, Bubba would listen. It took a few years for Miles to convince himself. By then, Bubba's look had softened. Miles knew he should go, though not before a warning from Bubba: The inertia of this coaching life -- this mad concoction of perfectionism, testosterone, moral compromise and the potent drug of triumph -- can eat your soul. Don't let it.

I love that Les Miles has proven that you can do this.. that you don't have to sell your soul out and be an insufferable asshole.. in order to win football games. And so win or lose tonight, we can say that Les Miles is not at an asshole.

The Tigers will win anyway. Based only on a hunch I think it's advisable to take the over in this game. Something like LSU Alabama 27 maybe.

Some nice things I can say about Les Miles

Les Miles does not throw random distasteful references to his lord and savior Jesus Christ into conversations that should be about football.

Unlike many college football coaches(Chizik) Les Miles is not a dick to his players.

Unlike many college footgall coaches (Chizik, Saban) Les Miles does not appear to be rage-a-holic macho shithead.

Compared to the industry standard, Les Miles is not the disgusting picture of self-importance we come to expect in a football coach.

Les Miles really does seem to enjoy himself doing whatever stupid thing he's doing out there.

Les Miles makes me laugh and seems like a nice enough guy. I just don't think he's the most organized fellow or a particularly smart football coach. Which is a shame given his job title.

Keeping our coaches

Gregg Williams no longer in running for Broncos job

This is great news for fans of no-tackling motherfuckers everywhere.



Miles to stay at LSU

This is great news for fans of high comedy, inexplicable football strategy, vegetarianism, and amusing T-shirts.



Meanwhile it's kind of a push for fans of knocking the LSU contingent. All week the knives have been out among the anti-LSU crowd and especially in the national media as preparations were underway to heap another round of shame upon the supposed ingratitude of Tiger fans. Indeed how dare these ungracious rubes expect the man in charge of the country's most fertile recruiting situation and one of its best supported programs playing in college football's premiere league to... know what he's doing more than half the time.

The problem here isn't that LSU fans don't appreciate what they have in Miles, it's that the national sports media does not now and never will appreciate that football is just all around better in the south and far better in Louisiana than they'll ever understand or admit. One would think that anyone who has spent the past five years in New Orleans tracking the various misapprehensions and prejudices harbored against this "part of the world" as President Bush so revealing termed it once would understand what's going on here. But, as always, the self-styled intelligentsia selectively ignores this sort of thing when it suits their own agenda.

Anyway, LSU fans will at least have Miles to kick around for a while... while the rest of the world kicks them.