Bear Bryant was the king of "buttering up the opponents" by praising their abilities before a game but, in his case, it was to make the press think he was about to beat a great team so they would be more impressed with Bama afterwards.
Speaking of negative coaches - Bear Bryant was the king of that talk. Every game he would moan & groan about how his team should not even be on the field with his opponent. Then he would go out and beat their butt!! So I don't think it matters just as long as you get it done on the field & the bottom line is we won nine games - by the skin of our teeth:tigerhead
of course that's the extreme end of it, but i think it could be used to good effect. there seem to be two types of posters here (of course it could be broken down into WAY too many categories, but two will suffice.) one type is the fans who think that yes, 9 wins are good, but the way those 9 games were won wasn't as impressive as the record indicates. the other type automatically assumes that 9 wins are what's important and bottom-line and nothing else matters, and that many programs would love to have 9 wins. i'm somewhere in between because while 9 wins are great, LSU could have as few as 6 this season the way the offense played. i have faith in miles because of the defensive problems in 2008. that season, however, miles fired the problem and hired chavis to fix it. boom, LSU shot up to a #12 ranking in defense. this season, miles didn't get rid of the problem, in fact it's a real possibility that he compounded it by hiring gonzales. that is what i mean by being proactive. miles reacts when the problem has already snowballed out of control instead of eliminating problems before they get that bad. miles isn't winning any popularity contests here. if i were him i'd be talking about how terrible the team was on offense and how badly it needs to be corrected instead of thinking "oh gosh, just think how close we were to the national championship game." please, LSU played nothing like a championship team this season, regardless of the record. but, i'm not miles, so it doesn't matter. the coaches and players can get in a circle and hold hands singing "kumbaya, my lord" but at the end of the day a coach has the responsibility of being honest to his players. he doesn't need to butter them up, that's the problem with society today.
That's the type of dumb statements Miles makes that just leave me shaking my head in disbelief. It goes along with - "best offensive line I've had at LSU" - possibly the worst in 30 years. "We finished second in the game" - I'm like the Aflac duck - hhhhuuuhhh? wtf? "We had the want to play Shepard" or "I would've liked to have seen a different play there" Les on your door it says Les Miles - Head Football Coach, make the decision. Alleva played along with that stupid "close" statement. Well, LSU was also "close" to losing to Miss State, La. Tech and Arkansas, which would've put the Tigers at 6-6. Like my little kids will tell you close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and Atom bombs.
We were close to losing WWII; we were close to another great depression; LSU was close to not getting to the BCS CG in 2007; Al Gore was close to being President and JFK was close to losing his election; Windows is getting close to being a Mac; the moon is astronomically close to the Earth; Catholics and Methodists are close to being the same religion; I am close to retirement age; some folks think we're close to the singularity... All interesting in the proper context. And all true to some degree. Miles' cmments are no different.
Miles' job as head coach is to be the face of LSU football. He is not going to take a negative spin of the season and present that. It is not going to happen. He will take the positives and try to build on them. That is what hs does, he builds the program. A vast majority of coaches do that and I appreciate Miles trying to push forward instead of wallowing in the past. By looking at the positive, he is not ignoring the negatives. He says plain as day that he is not satisfied. Read the end of the article. As usual, Miles is an expert in "coach speak" (pushing the positive and mentioning the negative in a positive way). If you don't like coach speak, then just don't read any coach's comments because if you are reading these kinds of articles for information... forget it.
Thanks TigerKid05 for a great post and thanks to those who read the entire article where Miles mentioned the goal as a BCS title and anything less being unacceptable. Also, nothing at all wrong with realizing a few breaks held LSU back from beating Bama. Of course, breaks could have gone the other way......for LSU, for Bama, how about Texas with :01 on the clock? Season results nor the coaching was totally acceptable. Changes have to be made. Self reflection is a good way to start. Lot more good in the LSU program than suck. I'm just saying........
