What Football Coaches Should Learn from Les Miles the Person

He tried his best to keep everyone in the fold, a family a breath away at a moment’s notice because of that hollow, haunting feeling of five years ago.

Then Smacker left to swim at Texas. Two years later, Manny left to play quarterback at North Carolina. And just before the start of this season—his most important in 12 years as coach at LSU—Ben committed to play fullback for Nebraska.

Les Miles, heartbroken from the loss of his sister Ann in a car accident four years earlier, finally had to let go.

"They’ve all chosen their paths, and we’re very proud of them," Miles told me of his children prior to the start of fall camp. "You teach them right from wrong, and the hope is one day that road leads back."

He paused for what seemed like forever, later admitting he was thinking about the day his oldest, Kathryn "Smacker" Miles, was born.

"I guess," he said, "eventually, it still can."

Miles was fired Sunday afternoon by LSU, another casualty of the win-or-walk world that is coaching college football. But understand this: If Miles, who won 114 games and a national title in Baton Rouge, failed at anything at LSU, it was giving of himself 365 days a year to the pressure-fueled ideal of coaching.

There’s only one coach who can match megalomaniacal king Nick Saban hour for hour, obsession for obsession. And it almost killed Urban Meyer to do it.

Too many times in this high-stakes, high-paying profession, we focus on the combustible surface of wins vs. losses and ignore the casualties of the family aftermath. Long before he coached for hard-driving Jimmy Johnson with the Dallas Cowboys, before he earned his first head-coaching job at Oklahoma State and before he even thought about being the coach who replaced the beloved Saban at LSU, Miles promised his wife Kathy he wouldn’t be that man.

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Then he became it. Not to the point of giving in to the daily madness and ignoring his family, but enough to where a fateful moment in the spring of 2011 made him recalibrate and reassess.

Ann Hope Browne died at the corner of Sugar Plantation Parkway and Louisiana 1 in Addis, Louisiana, a notoriously dangerous intersection overlooked for years until the unthinkable happened. Miles’ younger sister, a single mother with two daughters, lived 10 miles south of Baton Rouge, and for one reason or another—mostly because he became what he swore he wouldn’t—he never saw her nearly as much as he should.

The man who was trying to be all things for everyone in the intense and unforgiving world of college football coaching wasn’t what he wanted to be for someone so close to his heart.

"I have regrets," Miles said. "Great regrets."

This is the world most coaches choose: working and grinding and trying to win games, trying to get the next job or the next big payday, and the next thing you know, your children are grown up and out of the house.

By the time the job of a lifetime arrives, you don’t even recognize your family—even if it means you’re earning $5-6 million a year.

"At some point, money is money," Miles said. "It doesn’t replace missing your son throw a no-hitter."

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It’s not like Miles was absent as a father; far from it. He was always invested in Smacker’s swimming (she left home for Jacksonville, Florida, as a high schooler to swim for The Bolles School, a legendary prep school and swim factory), Manny’s football and baseball and Ben’s passion to always make a name for himself outside his brother and sister and young Macy Grace’s pursuit of softball. But the investment soon became a passion like no other after Ann’s death.

He and Kathy would take an RV and travel throughout the south to Smacker’s summer swim meets or Manny’s AAU baseball games or anything that allowed Miles the opportunity to give his kids what his father, Hope "Bubba" Miles, gave to him.

"He always told me whatever I wanted to do, I could do it," Miles said. "And gave me the belief that I could do it well."

Les tried to get Manny to stay home and join the LSU team as a preferred walk-on. But Manny chose the same deal with North Carolina.

He tried to convince Ben, one of the nation’s best fullbacks, to accept a scholarship offer to LSU. But Ben announced last month, days before the start of fall camp, he was committing to Nebraska.

You want a reflection of Les Miles? Look no further than his high-achieving children—and his ability to coach at a school as demanding as LSU for 11-plus seasons but still stay connected to those close to his heart.

He averaged 10 wins a season at a program that won double-digit games all of seven times in 122 seasons before he arrived. But the biggest win came on the darkest day.

"I never got a chance to tell [Ann] things I wanted to," Miles said. "I guess we all learn from events in our lives."

He’ll learn from this day, too.  

The end comes for everyone in the business, no matter how successful or how relevant. If you make it past four years at a major program these days, you’re still one bad season from it all falling apart.

Once it goes bad, it goes bad quickly—only an emotional response last year from packed Tiger Stadium amid a thrilling win over Texas A&M (and players carrying Miles off the field on their shoulders) prevented LSU from firing Miles well before it quickly unfolded Sunday.

"If you’re around long enough, it happens to all of us," Miles said about last season. "You can’t be consumed by it."

Leslie Edwin Miles may never coach again. He’s a young 62, but few leave such prestigious jobs and settle for less.

He’s already won the biggest game of all, and it has nothing to do with championships or big games or facing off against any nemesis.

Now it’s time to go enjoy it. With no regrets.

Follow Matt Hayes on Twitter @MattHayesCFB and at Facebook.