Former LSU coach Miles glad to be back on the sideline
ARLINGTON, Texas — Les Miles sat for more than hour, a Kansas pin on his left lapel and his LSU national championship ring on his right hand, answering wave after wave of often repetitive questions as he closes in on his return to coaching — and the Big 12 — with the longsuffering Jayhawks.
The session started with whether the one-game suspension for running back Pooka Williams in a domestic case was too short, and ended with the 65-year-old reminiscing about leaving the Dallas Cowboys for Oklahoma State and his first shot as a head coach nearly two decades ago.
In between, the theme was pretty consistent. The 2011 national coach of the year believes he’ll soon be back where he belongs after 2½ years away: on the sideline.
“I think it’s an enjoyment and a realization how much I am a football coach and how much I enjoy going to the sideline with my team,” Miles said as Big 12 media days opened Monday.
With that thought, Miles tried to peek through the crowd of reporters, looking for one of the tunnels at the home of the Dallas Cowboys because he realized he was on the same field where eight years earlier he led the Tigers into a season opener against Oregon.
“That moment, just kind of something that I fall back on, how much I enjoy taking the field with a team that was ready to play,” said Miles, whose team beat Oregon and was 13-0 before losing Les Miles, who won a national championship at LSU, is back in coaching, having taken the reins of long-struggling Kansas. to Alabama in the BCS championship game to end the 2011 season.
The title came four years earlier with a BCS win over Ohio State. Nearly a decade later, Miles was fired at LSU after a 2-2 start in 2016, having weathered years of criticism that his offense was too old-fashioned for the passhappy college game.
Now he finds himself in the pass-happiest conference among the Power Five leagues, where outscoring opponents has often been the trick to winning the title, as Oklahoma has shown while winning a record four straight Big 12 championships.
“If we need to throw the ball to win the game, we want to throw the ball to win the game,” said Miles, who signed a five-year contract worth $15.1 million before performance incentives. “If we need to run the ball to win the game, we’re going to run the ball to win the game.”