Les Miles is going to be interested in lots of coaching jobs over the coming months. The former LSU coach made it clear more than a year ago that he’d like to lead a program again, and the hiring cycle for 2018 is well underway.
Les Miles reportedly interested in Oregon State’s coaching job. Let’s consider the idea.
Miles wouldn’t win titles at Oregon State, but there’s some chance he’d make the team more talented.
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Last year, his name came up for jobs at Houston, Minnesota, and elsewhere. His pitch to Houston was reportedly bizarre, and UH hired Major Applewhite instead.
One job Miles is apparently interested in: Oregon State’s. The Corvallis Gazette-Times reported Wednesday that “multiple sources” confirmed Miles’ interest. It’s not clear if Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes shares Miles’ interest in the idea. Gary Andersen resigned in October and left $12 million in buyout money on the table.
“Interest” can mean as much or as little as the reader wants. But because Miles is one of the biggest available names on the market, let’s consider Miles-to-Corvallis.
Oregon State’s a super hard job in the first place.
A few reasons for that, briefly (more in here):
- It’s a low-budget athletic department by Power 5 standards.
- It’s not Oregon or Washington, so it won’t get the Pacific Northwest’s top recruits. And there aren’t that many elite players in the region to begin with. OSU’s 2017 class ranked 51st nationally and 11th in the Pac-12, and 2018’s will finish similarly.
- The Pac-12 North is a hard division, featuring Stanford and those two big PNW programs, as well as a Washington State that’s risen the last few years.
For those reasons, Miles at OSU wouldn’t be the same as Miles at LSU.
The Tigers have money and access to some of the most fertile recruiting pipelines in the country. The SEC West is hard, too, but LSU’s near the top of it.
Maybe the biggest knock on Miles at LSU was that he didn’t turn consistently elite rosters into consistently elite results. At Oregon State, he wouldn’t have an elite roster.
So the success of a Miles Oregon State program would come down to player development and strategic smarts. That probably doesn’t excite you, person who watched Miles’ LSU teams try to win with power running for years on end.
But I’m not sure what kind of coach Miles will be in his next job, if he ever gets one. He said last year that he’d been studying the old Baylor offense, a spread scheme that looks nothing like what Miles tended to run in Baton Rouge.
That’s not a thrilling idea either, though. Is Oregon State going to try to out-athlete the rest of the Pac-12 and win that way? Maybe a more Stanford-like downhill running scheme would suit the Beavers better, given their talent disadvantage. Or maybe the Beavers should go after Navy’s Ken Niumatalolo and install the triple option.
It’s hard to get excited about Miles-to-OSU or dismiss it out of hand.
Maybe he’d run his old LSU schemes, and maybe those would sort of work. Maybe he’d run something more rooted in the shotgun spread, and maybe that would sort of work. I say “sort of” because Oregon State isn’t going to have the players to become a serious Pac-12 contender unless a whole lot of stars align perfectly.
Miles turns 64 in November, and it’s not likely that he’d carry out a years-long rebuild. He is a name, though, and current recruits are old enough to have grown up while Miles was fielding good, nationally relevant teams at LSU. An obvious potential hitch is that Miles has never had a coaching job in the Pacific Northwest. He might not have close regional ties, and that wouldn’t help his recruiting efforts.
But if Miles recruited better than Andersen did — and than Oregon State typically has — he might leave the team in better shape for the next coach. At Oregon State, should that be good enough to be considered a successful run? I’d argue that it should.
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