Les Miles and Ole Miss Football: Some say no, but I say go, Les, go

There isn’t a better recruiter available

Les Miles took over the LSU football program in 2005. The Tigers weren’t exactly slumming it with Nick Saban at the helm previously, but the transition to Miles didn’t dampen the recruiting successes. Saban and Miles have been No. 1 and No. 2 in the SEC recruiting race for over a decade. Saban isn’t leaving his post, but Miles is a free agent.

The Tigers fell outside of the top 10 in the national recruiting rankings (per 247 sports) just twice in Miles’ 13 year tenure at LSU. In those instances they finished 11th (2008) and 14th (2012). His “down year” was a 14th overall finish, and that included linebacker Kwon Alexander, so it’s not like Miles whiffed on a class.

When you hold up the Rebels to that standard you might as well laugh. Here are the Rebels’ national rankings since 2013, the year after Hugh Freeze took over the program: 8, 15, 17, 5, 30. The current class, 2018, is being pegged by 247 Sports as the No. 63 class in the country.

The legitimacy of those recruits is certainly in question. But even if you put full faith and confidence that Freeze was honorable and honest in all his recruiting processes, the data speaks for itself. You don’t have to get into morality, just look at the numbers. Miles’ worst recruiting class in a decade was 14th. I didn’t even mention the string of top five (and top two) finishes he had during that time period. Freeze had two good years, Miles has been doing this for a much longer time.

If you’re ever going to win again in Oxford, let alone win big, you need talent. Miles might not have the football or clock management IQ of some of college football’s elite minds, but he can get good players to campus. In the long run, you can’t win without talent.