The decision on whether to fire LSU coach Les Miles, who had won 110 games, wasn't finalized until he was in the midst of winning his 111th.
F. King Alexander, LSU's president, acknowledged the 11th-hour determination, per the Baton Rouge Business Report. He said a halftime meeting of school administrators, including athletic director Joe Alleva and members of the LSU Board of Supervisors, during a 19-7 win over Texas A&M last week resulted in Miles being retained.
"It was a combination of factors and a decision that we made collectively," Alexander said. "We weighed all the factors in all this and it was a joint decision between many of our board members, our AD and many of us decided this was the wrong time and wrong place (to replace Miles.)"
No kidding.
Halftime of a game? Though Alexander said the decision had "pretty much been made" days earlier, it's difficult to fathom what the school could have determined between halves of an LSU home win that it couldn't be sure of weeks earlier, before Miles' job security came under intense speculation. Miles has averaged 10 wins per season over 11 years at the school and has won a national championship, yet Miles' ouster was clearly a possibility despite a $15 million buyout in his contract.
Even if the buyout had been only one dollar, the school's handling of the situation couldn't have been much worse. Alexander acknowledged Miles' buyout was nothing to be taken lightly.
"After the type of budget battle we went through this past spring we certainly do not need to be throwing tens of millions of dollars around under certain circumstances," Alexander said. "We don't need to go into the next legislative session with a black eye that we're throwing tens of millions of dollars around on issues that aren't associated with academic progress."
One of the most successful coaches in the country had his job on the line in the middle of a game; it's a little late to spare a black eye.
*Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter **@ChaseGoodbread*.
