When he was let go as LSU's head coach last September, many assumed Les Miles would walk into the first Power 5 job available. This is a coach that, for all his obvious and well-chronicled faults, had been a head coach for 16 continuous years and hadn't posted a losing record since his first.
That job, however, never materialized.
Miles is 63, and his first year on the job market resembled those of other coaches of a certain age to lose Power 5 jobs. Houston Nutt and Phillip Fulmer haven't found work again after being let go at, respectively, Tennessee and Ole Miss. Butch Davis landed the FIU job after six years out of the game. Tommy Tuberville is considering running for governor of Alabama rather than take a spin at another coaching job.
Speaking at a coaching clinic at Nebraska over the weekend (his son Ben is a freshman fullback for the Cornhuskers), The Hat said his future involves one thing.
"I want to coach football,” Miles told the Omaha World-Herald. “That’s pretty simple. I want an opportunity at a place that can win and a place where they really want to invest in the players. If they do that, I’m good."
Miles pitched himself as an evolved coach on the interview trail -- Steve Sarkisian was a rumored hire as offensive coordinator -- and he trotted that pitch out again to the reporters in Lincoln. "I’m probably a better coach today than I was when I left LSU, and I was certainly a better coach in my last years at LSU than I was in my first years," he said.
College football's most loquacious out-of-work coach also had a great one-liner when asked if he'd have recruited Ben Miles to LSU had he remained in Baton Rouge: "I promise you this, if we had won about 11 games (last season), I’d have put a last-minute rush on him. Heck, I knew his mom."