A lot of the folks on this board, both the negative ones and the critical ones, are doing what they’re doing because they’re worried about the future of LSU football. “What if this is it for a while?” they secretly wonder. “Dinardo did OK at first, too. And look where he got us.”
A fair point. There are some things to worry about (timeouts on change of possession, too much hitting at practice, unknown prowess as a bigtime recruiter). But the same Negative posters are ignoring that bane of statistical existence – the sample size. LSU’s had 11 games with Miles as head coach. More data ALWAYS produces more accurate data. To that end, a quick look at the numbers from Miles’ past shows that the TREND is that LSU will improve in two key areas that people here are worried about.
I’m aware that OSU and LSU are apples and oranges on many different levels. However, there’s a lot of people who think the following two propositions are true without very many facts to back themselves up. I’m trying to counter that, and trying to do so with at least a little thought behind it.
I’m getting all of this from the Big XII itself, by the way. And it took me about 3 minutes to find this on Google:
http://www.big12sports.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/statistics.html
1. Miles is too conservative on offense. Loves fullbacks and TE’s. Smashmouth, Smashmouth, Smashmouth. Plays not to lose.
Wrong, of course. That’s been gone over already by several conscientious posters. Miles will chuck in when he feels he can. He had Josh Fields, Roshaun Woods and Tatum Bell in 2002 and 2003, and had his offense churning out over 400 per game those years, more of hit thru the air than ground. More importantly, OK State went from 9th in 2002, to 1st in Red Zone offense in 2003 and 2004 (3rd and 4th in RedZone TD’s those same years, so they weren’t keeping up percentages cheaply). This presents clear evidence that Miles has had no problems going for the throat in the past.
It’s also worthy of note that OK State was better than 32 ppg in 2002, 2003 and 2004. That’s a lot of scoring for “pulling back the reins.” And all of the 2004 stats should be viewed with the notation that they had no Roshaun Woods, a 26-year old Vernand Morency at RB, and their current 2nd string SS playing QB for them.
2. Miles runs an undisciplined program – you can tell by the number of penalties.
This is a favorite of mine. A 51-game starter who was going 1st round until 2 months ago starts committing false starts, and all of a sudden Miles is retarded. A 4.0 center who’ll have a license to remove your spleen in 8 years not only throws a block a full 4 seconds after a play is blown dead, but runs past the LSU ballcarrier lying on the ground with the ball to do so, and Miles is unfit to coach Pop Warner. And a 5th-year senior like Addai forgets the punt-coverage maxim we all learned in 8th grade that you NEVER, EVER leave the inside man for the outside man, and Miles should go sell insurance.
If you buy that, look at the penalty stats from OK State’s last 3 years. Look at the TREND. 11th of 12 in the conference in 2002, over 70 ypg. 9th of 12 in 2003, just over 60 ypg (call it one less penalty per game). And 2nd in the Bg XII in 2004, a mere 35.4 ypg. My guess that’s about 5 penalties per game.
So one of two things is true. It’s either the player’s fault, and Miles can’t do anything about it anyway so there’s no reason to conclude he’s a bad coach because of too many penalties, or it’s a coaching issue. And if that’s true, Miles has already demonstrated that he’s able to recognize how big a problem penalties are, and fix the problem once identified. That's something good coaches do.
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