Texan Mosaic

by STEVEN GEHEGAN//Editorial Assistant

It seems that no coaching job is safe anymore, even with a championship.

After 10 year and three games, Les Miles is out as the head coach of Louisiana State University. It would seem after all of the winning seasons, along with the national championship he won, it would not be enough to get him through the season. No coach should lose his job in the middle of a season, just because of a record. Just because you lose a few games at the beginning of the season does not mean that you cannot compete for a conference championship.

After almost losing his job last season, Miles should have got the message. It seems he did not. His style of running offense does not work anymore. It was a message that LSU tried to send to him last year, but he still kept his offensive coordinator, Malcolm “Cam” Cameron, who got fired at the same time as Miles.

There were two main problems with the offense, with the first being his style. The way college football is played now is that you need to be able to run at least some up-tempo offense, something that Miles did not seem to want to do.

Even just a few years ago, the LSU offense was fine winning low-scoring games and competing in the South Eastern Conference. But with school such as the University of Mississippi, Texas A&M and others putting up lots of points, Miles’ offense was left behind. Miles was given the off-season to fix these problems, but he seemed to think that his style would work. But through the first three games of this season, it seems that it does not.

It is not that Miles did not have any talent at LSU. He was always able to get many of the top recruits across the nation, such as Leonard Fournette, Patrick Peterson and Odell Beckham Jr. The only thing Miles could not do was find a quarterback.

That leads to the second problem with the offense, which is that he did not recruit and develop a great quarterback. Outside of the University of Alabama, you need a great quarterback to be able to compete for a national championship. For whatever reason, Miles was unable to recruit a great quarterback. Maybe he did not put enough emphasis on a quarterback, or he did not develop the good one that he got. We will not know, only that he was unable to get a quarterback.

It seems that it has become a new trend to fire coaches in the middle of the season, which is not right. They should be given a chance to prove that they can fix the team’s issues. If they cannot, then fire them at the end of the season.

In the case of Miles, he should have been fired last season. If the university did not want him to be around, then get rid of him. Even if LSU was not able to get their top choice for a head coach, they should have gone in another direction without Miles, using this season to get used to the new coach, and maybe win next year. Now they have an interim head coach and will have to start that process next year.