Great talent makes average coaches look like a genius. Miles is the poster child for this.
No, that would be Mike Leach.
If you're saying that TX Tech had great talent while Leach was there you're sadly mistaken. Tech has always had very average talent at best, with a few superstars (Crabtree) thrown in, and a bunch of overachievers (Welker, Z Thomas). We've always recruited the leftovers after UT, A&M, OU, and every other big time school in the nation takes their pick of TX high school talent.
Question: What did TT do before and after the 2 years with Harrell/Crabtree?
Answer: NOTHING
Yet while they were there, Mike Leach was the greatest thing since sliced bread, up for consideration for every head coaching vacancy in the nation. Now, not so much.
If you pay attention to football, there's no coach that coaches up average talent to a championship level. Great players CAN, but not always do, make coaches look like geniuses. And, at the college level, recruiting talent is a big part of what makes coaches careers or breaks them. I defy you to name a coach that takes scrubs and make them a championship level team. It takes superstars. It's not a coincidence that the BCS Title game this year has the Heisman winner, and another Heisman finalist.
Leach? Like him or hate him, only a fool would deny what he did at Texas Tech...and you do have to take the type of program in to account. His shortcomings are not in his coaching ability, but his personality. TT hasn't won a championship at any level in probably 40 years. Only Steve Sloan had a better conference winning percentage, and only did it for 3 seasons, and in a far different conference back in the mid 70s. Leach has the best overall winning percentage of any coach at TT since Pete Cawthon from 1930-1940, and he started that long before Harrell and Crabtree arrived, they just helped get a program that otherwise has no chance of a championship to near that level. Leach, if anything, is an example of lesser talent performing at a higher than expected level, not the opposite.
This tact of failing to give coaches credit for accomplishments because they did it with great players, is just stupid. Moronic. Folks that do that are more than willing to give the coach all the blame for falling short or failing despite factors out of their control.
When Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Pete Carroll, or whoever takes over a program like Vanderbilt, Baylor, Northwestern, etc and wins a championship then you may convince me that there's coaches out there that are great coaches despite talent. They used to say about Bear Bryant "he can take his, and beat yours, and yours and beat his". However, because under the recruiting rules then he was able to hoard players, he never had to prove that. Bryant even admitted about one local player that played HS ball in my day, whose name escapes me now, who was known to not be the brightest bulb in the box...that Bear recruited him primarily so he wouldn't have to face him someday on playing for the opposition.
Great players can hide some deficiencies, but there's numers examples of teams loaded with talent that underperformed. Miami and FSU are recent examples of programs that have been loaded with talent for some time, and been very mediocre. You have to coach AND/OR manage great talent too...you can't just put it on the field and tell them to go make a play.
As for Miles...a good portion of the fan base will never accept him. He is a good coach. Great? Probably not, but good enough to win 10 games a season on avg in the SEC, and you can't suck and do that, even at a place like LSU, Alabama, or Florida. Dinardo, Shula, and Zook are prime examples. You can stumble in to a 10 win season at those programs, but you can't sustain it if you suck.
Les Miles, like ALL coaches has shortcomings. Unfortunately for Les, his is clock management, and it plays out for even the most ignorant fans, who don't otherwise know the difference between screen pass and a punt, to see and recognize on many Saturdays on national TV. So, he sucks. Coaching, the majority of it, and the stuff that even gets you to where clock management matters, is done Sunday - Friday, and out of the watchful eye of the cameras. What Miles has done with a QB like Jordan Jefferson, is really pretty amazing. With even a moderately trusworthy QB that could manage an offense, this LSU team probably would have been a NC contender. As it is, they fell short with a 11 win season, and lost only to the team playing for the BCS title, and a rival SECW team that also won 10 games, and played in a BCS bowl.
