Wednesday, January 25, 2012

If I were an LSU fan, or, Hello Freddy Krueger, Nice Hat!

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am Not an LSU fan. I often refer to the school as "State", the way Mississippi State or Michigan State fans and alums refer to their beloved school. No one else in the world refers to LSU as "State". I think deep down inside I do it because it has a connotation that they are second rate, much the same as Michigan State is 2nd fiddle in their state to the University of Michigan, etc.

I tend to refer to LSU's colors as purple and yellow. LSU fans swear that their colors are purple and gold. As I see it, the Saints and Notre Dame wear gold, tweety bird is yellow. LSU wears purple and yellow. LSU, once upon a time, did wear gold. But that was years ago, now they wear yellow.

With all of that said, you might begin to believe that I don't like LSU.
Note: It should be mentioned that their is a big difference between dislike and apathetic.
I will save my commentary on how my feelings towards LSU developed for another time. Today, however, I will share with you my thoughts on if I were an LSU fan.

I would not be a Les Miles fan.

Yesterday, one of my LSU fan family members dragged me into a discussion via facebook about the number of LSU players that will be playing in the Superbowl next week. There will be 4. This led me to search the grandeur of the interweb in search of statistics on what other schools had players in the Superbowl. In the process I stumbled into a yellow mine(sorry, I meant gold  mine). ESPN's website has lists broken down that show the players from each university that are currently on NFL rosters. Congratulations LSU, you had 41. From my calculations you had the most, though I didn't count every single school. If not the most they were certainly top three, but I digress....

As I scrolled through the names of Tigers in "The League", I began to think(scary, I know). Les has Been the Head Football Coach at LSU for 7 years. He boasts a 75-17 record, is 5-1 in Bowl Games, has led his team into 2 BCS title games and has won one of those(2007)  My thoughts led me through this line of thoughts.
1. Wow, 41 is a lot of players from one school, good for LSU.
2. Man, with that many NFL caliber players it's no wonder LSU is doing so well these days.
3. Ha, I remember the 80's when LSU wasn't that good. Remember the phrase, "we might have lost the game be we won the party"?
4. I wonder how LSU went from mediocre to one of the top programs.
5. I bet it was recruiting good players and providing them with good coaching.
6. Interesting, from what I know about their coaches in the 2000's they have reputations as very good, detail oriented coaches and Excellent recruiters.
7. Wow, with all that talent and 10+ years of great recruiting they have won two BCS titles.
8. But the second title was won mostly with players recruited by the coach previous to Les Miles.
9. Well, that doesn't matter, it was his 3rd year so it was his system.
10. After that title they stayed good, true, but seemed to struggle with the same issue for about 4-5 years, offensive issues especially at quarterback.
11.Finally, why have they had these continuing problems for so many years in a row?

And that's when it hit me. LSU recruits great talent. Yeah, I said it, great talent. So much talent in fact that no other school puts more players into the NFL than the boys from the "Ole War Skule"(an LSU nickname). But, with all that talent, they struggle to remain at the top. So, i pondered that thought. I came up with 2 theories.

An Aside- I never dreamed I would write so long on the topic of LSU.

Theory #1
Les Miles Recruits talent, then tries to figure out how to build his system around that talent.

There is some sense in that logic. Get the best players you can get, figure out what they can do, then do that. You should be pretty successful with this plan if you are getting in good players. HOWEVER, I see a problem. If you are constantly building around what your players can do, and there is a constant stream of players coming in and going out, then you never have consistency. You could infer(as I am) that because of your lack of consistency you will never maximize your ability to do anything. You can get really good at it. But, you won't become great at it because as players move in and out you will shift what you do and start trying to get good at a new system that you believe fits "this years" team better. Well, that is good for the new guys, but think about what it does to your returners. They have the potential to improve from week to week and year to year to the point where they can master something. Then their legs are cut out from under them and that have to start anew with the way the will do things "this year".

In short, they only  become consistent at being inconsistent, which never leads to mastery of anything.

Theory #2-somewhat inspired by something I heard on "After further review" a local sports talk radio show on 104.5, an ESPN affiliate in Baton Rouge, LA. 
"The Quarterback Problem". This is actually a splinter from theory #1.
One of the things that the previous theory got me to thinking about was the way Les Miles handles and recruits quarterbacks. If you look back into his tenure, Les has brought in several "pocket passers" and several "option" style quarterbacks. This seems to strengthen the argument from theory #1. He is not recruiting the people that are best for his system, he is recruiting the best players, in general, that he can find. What this tells us, or me at least, is that Les Miles has NO system. I don't see how you can EFFECTIVELY prepare a team to perform under 2 systems at one time. True, Urban Myer won a BCS title rotating in Chris Leak and Tim Tebow, but that was not a 2 system offense. It was Leaks offense, Tebow was just a goal line exclamation point.

My point here is this: Les Miles needs to figure out what his system is, stick with that system, build with that system in mind, recruit with that system in mind. That way, should your starting quarterback find himself suspended from the team due to his role in a bar fight, whatever it was that Ryan Perriloux did, or injured, your number 2 quarterback can step right in and you will maintain the continuity and direction that you have worked to establish over the given length of time and you will avoid that dilemma of having to switch your entire strategy and related personnel to fit with the abilities of the 2nd quarteback. For example, a few years back, Drew Bledsoe played for the Patriots, he got hurt and I guy by the name of Tom Brady stepped right in and the team didn't miss a beat. 3 Superbowl rings later......I think you see where I am going with this.

And so, for the afore mentioned reasons, and mainly because I don't see Les Miles changing the way he does things, I, if i were somehow possessed by a demon and sent through the looking glass to cheer for le Tigres in some fantastic wonderland , would don the purple and tweety, but would would have one thing to say about the "Mad Hatter".....


............"OFF WITH HIS HEAD".



***Note: It was hard, but this post was written with the intentional exclusion of the name of the LSU coach that preceded Les Miles and the school that currently employs him.

***Rationale: 1. to present an unbiased post to the reader by not agitating any LSU fans by just the mere sight of the intentionally unmentioned words. 2. to subject myself to the thought that perhaps like some twisted version of Star Wars, that a small piece of the dark side does reside in me and what it would be like if I did turn to the evil empire.

********Now I must go purge and purify myself be replaying and reliving the events of January 9th, 2012.

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