Punter Brad Wing stares up in disbelief following LSU’s loss to Alabama in the BCS title game. (Credit: Cory Smith)

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him.”

 – Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Imagine a man walks up to you on the street and says, “I’m a pathological liar.”

What can you make of such a statement? If the man is a liar, why is he being honest about his lies? If he’s not a pathological liar, why is he dishonestly saying he is?

In the hypothetical above it stands to reason that this man would be difficult to trust, whichever case is true.

Now, imagine a football coach is hired at a major university, and his first words to the public are: “The only thing that I can tell you is that I am relatively honest and somewhat deceptive.”

Unfortunately, this is no hypothetical. When he was hired as LSU’s head coach seven years ago, Les Miles uttered those exact words. Some, if not most, passed it off as a slip of the tongue, which has now become a familiar excuse concerning Miles’ proclivity for minced words.

In the wake of arguably the most disappointing loss in LSU football history, however, Miles’ declaration of dishonesty seems almost prophetic. That’s because a majority of LSU fans, followers, and members of the media feel as if they have been lied to.

“All we hear about is how nice a guy Miles is and how wonderful a parent and person he is, and all of that is true,” wrote Glenn Guilbeau in the Shreveport Times last week. “But know this, he lies as much or more than any coach there is.”

Guilbeau’s condemnation of Miles has caught traction among Tiger fans, who are clearly divided following last week’s 21-0 loss to Alabama in the BCS National Championship Game. Even coming off one of the greatest football seasons in LSU history, Baton Rouge finds itself split, once again, on either side of Les Miles.

Untruths under center

On one hand, there is the Guilbeau Gang, those who feel Miles has deceived them throughout the season on many key issues.

The biggest issue this group takes with Miles, however, is his deceptive handling of the quarterback situation. In leading LSU to an 8-0 record as the SEC’s most efficient passer, senior Jarrett Lee – who took over for fellow senior Jordan Jefferson upon the latter’s early-season suspension for involvement in a bar fight – became a fan favorite. Despite throwing 18 interceptions as an emergency starter in his freshman season and being benched for Jefferson, Lee stuck around, working hard in the shadows to improve his play and refusing to transfer elsewhere in pursuit of playing time.

“I didn’t come to LSU to transfer,” Lee said. “I didn’t want to leave. I came for the great tradition and to be around some great people.”

It was a persistence that impressed fans, teammates, and coaches alike.

“He’s been in our stadium and he’s been baptized under fire,” Miles said of Lee. “It can’t get any hotter for him than the places he’s been.”

Therein lies Miles’ first lie, because apparently, it could get hotter – in the form of a nice, warm spot on the bench. After throwing two interceptions in the first half of LSU’s first matchup against Alabama Nov. 5, Lee was benched by Miles for Jefferson. Jefferson would go on to lead LSU to a 9-6 victory, and he played well as the starter in his next two games against Western Kentucky and Arkansas.

All the while, however, fans were clamoring for Lee to see meaningful snaps – as, at worst, reward for his spectacular early-season play after struggles early in his career and, at best, a better option for the LSU offense than Jefferson – Miles assured Lee would not get lost in the shuffle.

“We need both,” Miles repeated. “We’ll use both.”

Cajun cannon shoots off

Bobby Hebert couldn’t believe it.

A former New Orleans Saints quarterback more accustomed to seeing the Superdome from field level than the press box, Hebert couldn’t understand why Miles was sticking with Jefferson in the third quarter, as the Tigers trailed Alabama 12-0 and had failed to cross midfield on offense. Despite LSU’s inability to crack the century mark in offensive yardage, after Jefferson took sack after sack by holding the ball too long against the vaunted Alabama pass rush, even after Jefferson underhand tossed an interception to Alabama’s CJ Mosely, Miles left him in.

One word manifested itself repeatedly inside the head of the former pro-turned-radio host: ridiculous.

For Hebert, playing Lee in the game wasn’t a matter of reward, or even redemption. It was just common sense. To get technical, Alabama was playing Zone Two behind heavy pressure, sealing the edges where Jefferson thrives but leaving gaps in the secondary for an accurate, quick-thinking quarterback like Lee to exploit. More simply, forgetting prejudice or redemption or anything else media members invented to sell papers: for the sake of the offense, it was time to put the ball back in Lee’s hands.

Yet the only thing in Lee’s hands was his helmet. It was at his side as he watched with the rest of the nation, as the LSU offense crumbled in its biggest moment.

“Are you kidding me? ” Hebert thought, fuming.

It was that anger, built up throughout the game – throughout four frustrating seasons of seeing his son T-Bob struggle through Miles’ many gaffes (most famously clock issues at Ole Miss in 2009 and against Tennessee in 2010) – that finally exploded in the post-game presser, when Hebert used his media credential to let Miles, for lack of a better term, have it:

“Coach,” he asked, “did you ever consider bringing in Jarrett Lee, considering that you weren’t taking any chances on the field?  Now, I know Alabama’s defense is dominant.  But, come on, that’s ridiculous, five first downs!”

“I’ll tell from you the fans’ standpoint,” he added, at this point so angry that his sentences began rambling incoherently, “that how can you not maybe push the ball down the field and bring in Jarrett Lee [sic]? So what if you get a pick six? It seems like the game plan that, not pushing the ball down the field, considering it’s like a Rueben Randle or Odell Beckham, Jr. … I know the pass rush of Alabama, but there’s no reason why in…five first downs…you have a great defense, LSU is a great defense, but that’s ridiculous.”

“Do you have a question?” the moderator asked.

Conspiracy theories

Hebert would clarify his question – “Do you think you should have pushed the football more down field?” – but that was not the real question. The real question: why not Lee?

“As much as I would have liked to have put Jarrett Lee in because the program owes him a lot – he really did a great job for us in the beginning of the year and really throughout his career – I felt like it would be unfair to him with the pass rush that he would sustain to put him in late in that game and considering that Jefferson could throw in a like fashion but could avoid the pass rush [sic],” Miles said.

Miles might have been selling it, but few – including Hebert – were buying it.

“It was a shame to have five first downs in the national championship game, to not put in Jarrett Lee,” Hebert said on ESPN’s The Herd last week. “Without Jarrett Lee, you wouldn’t have started off undefeated. So why not attempt to go with the hot hand?”

Statistics more clearly support Hebert’s claim. By percentage, Lee was sacked fewer times per play than Jefferson, despite the latter’s better speed.

Afterward, Hebert wasn’t the only person expressing displeasure about the quarterbacks.

“Tonight we picked the wrong one,” said offensive lineman Will Blackwell of the quarterbacks.

LSU fans, meanwhile, weren’t buying Miles’ pass-rush excuse. Callers flooded radio talk shows with complaints, which eventually berthed conspiracy theories about why Lee didn’t play. At first, these ranged from the academic (Lee was being punished for bad grades) to the pandemic (Lee was sick), but as time wore on, the theories became more twisted, even sinister.

Some purported Miles or Jefferson threw the game, citing late movement in the Vegas line. (Columnist Scott Burns’ response: “All this talk about powerful boosters paying players to throw the game is crazy talk. Jordan Jefferson can’t throw a pass, much less an entire game.”)

The most prevalent was that several offensive players, including Hebert and wideout Russell Shepard, demanded pre-game that Miles start Lee. They were, allegedly, infuriated with Jefferson’s lack of preparation for the game. Upon this, it is said, Miles decided to bench Lee and the demanders, regardless of the fate.

“The end of man”

Regardless of the theory held, fans are insisting, in some way or another, that Miles has lied to them. Perhaps some of these conspiracy theories hint at truth, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

I would bet on the fact that Miles is lying, or at least being, as he puts it, “deceptively honest.” His pass rush theory holds about as much water as a strainer, and the legitimacy of “we need both” has long since been discredited. Lee should have played. Anyone with a lick of football sense knows this.

The question, then, is why Miles lies, or deceives, or provides half-truths. And the answer is obvious: to protect the interests of the programs. Why Lee didn’t play, in all likelihood, will never be found out, because the reason, one way or the other, would be harmful to the program. Were it a personal issue for Lee, Miles has protected him, and thus the program. Were it a matter of disagreement in the locker room that cost Lee his playing time, Miles must take the heat himself to avoid burning his players.

“Les Miles is a fine coach and man,” former LSU basketball Head Coach Dale Brown – a man familiar with the line between fact and fiction himself – told me. “It’s not all about who you coach or even where you coach. It is about why you coach, and this is what makes Les very special.”

Why Miles coaches is for the kids, and he will always protect them at the expense of the fan. Sure, sometimes it costs him popularity with the fans, and it certainly doesn’t appease raging emotions in the light of a difficult loss, but he certainly believes he is acting in the best interest of the program.

Of course, the fans ought to realize, in calling out Miles, that they too should prepare to answer for their own lies. Miles has not been the only dishonest character in this story. It is the fans, not Miles, who have concocted the conspiracy theories. In all honesty, he wouldn’t have. It is also the fans who believed a man telling them that he was “relatively honest and somewhat deceptive.”

Miles isn’t the only one who has lied to LSU fans: we’ve lied to ourselves. Cue Jack Nicholson: We don’t want to know the truth. Not just the truth about our coaches and our players, but the truth about our beliefs, our priorities, our idols, our faith, and ourselves.