Les Miles … and dial-up internet

Do you guys remember dial-up Internet?

I do. It was on the first home computer my family ever had in the late 1990s.

You remember the ugly sound it used to make while it was connecting? It was sort of a phone sound, but sort of not. Honestly, it sounded like something inside the computer was in pain. It was like a cross between a stomach growling and nails scratching a chalkboard.

Of course, pain was a common theme in the whole process, because once the computer actually did connect, not much else happened.

The connection was too slow to support much of anything. It’d taken literally hours to download a file as small as a single song.

OK, I hear your whispers. You want to know what this all has to do with sports.

So let’s continue.

As I watched the LSU football team play Wisconsin two Saturdays ago, my first instinct was to be mad. After all, I’m an alum of the school, and I have a vested interest in the Tigers to do well.

But once the brat in me behaved itself and I realized that football is just an insignificant piece of the wonderful game we call life, I couldn’t help but to think of those scratchy sounds my computer made in the ‘90s.

Folks, it pains me to say it, but the LSU offense is exactly to college football what dial-up Internet is to the world today.

It’s something that was once useful, but is now irrelevant and obsolete because of the way things have evolved in society.

Simply put, the LSU offense just doesn’t work anymore – at least not at the level it’d need to for the Tigers to contend with the big-time power programs in modern college football.

College football is changing. It’s no secret. The game we see on TV today looks nothing like the game that was played 20 years ago.

Back when I was a kid, teams almost never threw the ball.

It wasn’t physically possible. There weren’t enough high-end high school quarterbacks in the country to support it.

Most teams ran the option. Those that didn’t ran power-oriented I-formation sets – looks that greatly resemble what LSU utilizes today.

The emphasis was less on speed and more on power.

Teams didn’t throw the ball 50 times a game then. They didn’t have to.

But then things changed.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the quarterback position evolved. Around that time, coaches got smart and realized that if you take all of your best athletes and spread them out across the field, it’s pretty easy to score points, because it’s tough for just 11 defenders to defend 100 yards worth of grass without allowing big plays.

That change led to a revitalization of the game – a renaissance that dipped into high school football, as well.

Because of that, we saw more kids play quarterback at a high level than ever before, which, of course, bled back into the college game and caused coaches to adapt to their personnel.

But Les Miles has never adapted to that change.

At first, it didn’t matter, because teams didn’t throw.

The offense LSU runs is archaic. The Tigers run formations that literally no one else in the country use.

How many other teams line up in I-formation 75 percent of the time and run the ball almost two and a half times more than it passes?

How many teams don’t throw to its tight ends – at all?

How many teams recruit players who spent their ENTIRE high school careers playing shotgun spread football, but then force them to run vanilla formations they’ve never run before?

The answer is no one – except LSU.

I’m a Les Miles guy; so writing this column today comes with a lot of pain and anguish.

But in life, sometimes it’s hard for a person to go away from things that were successful in the past – even if evolution has made those ways obsolete.

The LSU offense has to change. It’s no secret. It’s needed to change for five years now – if not longer.

But the man in charge just refuses to do it. He’s sticking by his guns and is staying true to the run-heavy sets he’s used his whole career.

It hurts to say, but maybe it’s time LSU takes the man in charge out of the situation altogether?

He’s had success in Baton Rouge, yes.

He’s been a wonderful ambassador for the state, yes.

But he’s trying to run a business using dial up Internet at a time when the industry is dominated by cable.

It just won’t work, Les. It just won’t work.

I hate to see ‘ya go, but I think now is the time.

Old habits die hard, and those old habits have slowly taken LSU football off its perch near the top of the college football pecking order.

And it all happened one I-formation dive to the halfback at a time. •

Les Miles

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