Man, I wish I hadn't missed that. Didn't even know ESPN was going to run it.
I think that the thing that has always fascinated me about Les Miles may be that he is so much like players I knew. There were always guys who talked a good game, but once you got them out on the field, you saw that it was all talk.
What has always bugged me is that since then, this type of person hangs around the game, is very loud about it, and I know from listening to him that he is more mouth than anything else. But there is not a thing I can do about it -- but just sit there and watch him keep mouthing off. The media is full of these guys. Boiling over with them. It's been that way now for the past 25 or 30 years.
Les' problem has been that as soon as the Saban effect wore off on LSU football, Les' loud, "confident" talk has more and more been proven to be just that -- TALK.
I had never heard an LSU coach come over into south Alabama like Les did and just mouth off about how he wanted this and that player. The last player like that he wanted, he said very plainly for the media, was Trent Richardson. "We need a great tailback," he said. When Saban was coming over here from LSU and plucking JaMarcus Russell and a few other blue chippers out of Mobile, he just slipped over in the night, as it were, and took them away, without saying anything. Now that Saban is at Alabama, about all Les can do about the Mobile-Pensacola-Baldwin County area is just talk. That's what Les excels at. He even showed that in that Big Cat video. Les is a great talker.
But wait a minute. Les can't even do that. When the light comes on, Les is often so tongue-tied that he can't put together a good sentence. His sentences are so bad, they aren't funny -- they're just bad.
When Gerry DiNardo was at LSU, not only did he rarely if ever sign some player out of south Alabama -- he never said one thing about even trying to. Then Saban came in and changed the way they recruited at LSU. And then once Saban left for Miami, ol' Les wanted us all to believe that he was going to be a force in the Mobile area. He hasn't been. Nick Saban has continued to be the force in south Alabama.
I don't like to jump somebody's bones publicly, but when a guy is so openly brash, takes so much credit that isn't due him, and is so obviously trying to portray himself as something he is not, THAT is what I notice. And Les has been this way ever since he got to LSU.
The first thing Les did when he got to LSU was to turn the LSU signing ceremony into a statewide radio event. He proclaimed that LSU was going to continue what Saban had begun, but he didn't mention Saban's name. He was, he said, going to keep Louisiana's blue-chippers in state. He has pretty well kept that promise.
But the problem with that first class he signed was that in that small group of about 18 or 20 players was Ryan Perriloux. He made a big deal about signing Perriloux, who was one of the top-ranked players in the whole country coming out of high school. But Saban had refused to recruit Perriloux before leaving for Miami. That whole thing blew up in Les' face. It was mostly talk where Perriloux was concerned. Perriloux had all the ability in the world, but he lacked character, and Saban knew it and Les didn't. Les has never recovered from that mistake. He has had quarterback problems ever since. BIG quarterback problems.
Once Les got into his first season at LSU, to hear him talk on New Orleans WWL Radio, out of Baton Rouge, you would have though he was Knute Rockne, Bear Bryant, and Vince Lombardi, all rolled into one. When it came time to play Alabama, I'll never forget what he said -- "We need to hit our stride." His problem has been that yes, they hit their stride, but it was a stride that Nick Saban had begun. Once Saban's footprints gave out at Baton Rouge, Les' talk has sounded more and more like -- talk.
