Burns’ Bad beats: What in the world was Les Miles thinking?
Black Friday super special discount – Les Miles’ coaching clinics. Get ‘em while they last.
Miles and his staff fell completely apart in Saturday’s 25-23 to Ole Miss.
CLICK HERE NOW TO VIEW BEN BURNS’ WEEKLY PICKS —>
Trailing by two, LSU recovered an onside kick and quickly moved to the Rebels’ 32 with 1:04 left in the game. Miles had two timeouts in his pocket and needed only a few safe yards to improve his kicker’s chances.
The obvious move was to pick up a few yards on the ground, milk the clock and use your timeouts to set up for the winning field goal.
Instead, Miles and his staff called three straight pass plays that resulted in an incompletion, a sack for a loss of nine and completion on a blown-up screen that resulted in a seven-yard loss. Even worse, the Tigers failed to get a timeout after the third-down loss until the clock had run down to just nine seconds.
LSU went from 1st and 10 and in field-goal range with a minute to play to 4th and 26 at the 49 with only 26 seconds to play. Now, that’s coaching.
But it gets worse. On fourth down, Tiger quarterback Jordan Jefferson connected with Terrance Tolliver on a desperation pass down to the Ole Miss five yard line. The clock stopped to move the chains with just one second to play.
LSU sprinted to the line but looked extremely confused and was unable to spike the ball before the final second ticked off the clock.
“When Terrance caught it, I thought the field-goal unit was going to come out and kick the field goal and we were going to win the game,” Jefferson told reporters. “They had a lot of communication going on. Time was running out. I mean it was just a lot of confusion.”
Even though it was debatable whether or not LSU would have been able to get a play off on the final play, the field goal team has to be ready to sprint onto the field. Barring a miracle touchdown, picking up the first down and kicking a field goal was the best chance the Tigers had of pulling off the comeback.
What in the world were they talking about during the timeout before the fourth-down play?
Miles makes $3.75 million.
LSU covered as 6-point road dogs, but anyone who liked the Tigers enough to take them on the moneyline is still fuming over the last minute of that game.
Revenge of the Underdog
We all knew it was coming. But were you ready?
Bad beats: What in the world was Les Miles thinking?
NFL favorites, both big and small, ruled September and early October. The chalk was cashing at such a high percentage that it almost made you paranoid. Sooner or later the underdogs were going to bite back.
Consider yourself bitten.
In the last 30 days, underdogs have been covering at a 56.9 percent clip and just recently wrestled away the overall season covers lead from the favorites.
Before Monday night’s game, underdogs were 8-6-1 against the number in Week 11 and are now 79-75-5 ATS on the season. That includes Sunday’s pair of suicide pool killers, Kansas City over Pittsburgh and Oakland over Cincinnati.
So what you knew was eventually going to happen back in early October has. But were you able to take advantage?
David Payne wrote this on behalf of Ben Burns
Month after month Ben Burns is one of our websites TOP CAPPERS!
