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.