Les Miles: LSU Coach Tapped to Be Next NCAA-to-NFL Bust

We've seen it too many times before.

Successful college football coaches that go from the NCAA to the NFL do not have a great track record.

In the last few years alone, we saw Bobby Petrino run away from the Atlanta Falcons 13 games into his first season, and Nick Saban return to the college game after two years with the Miami Dolphins.

Both were extremely successful with their previous college programs and just as successful with their current programs.

Plain and simple, they are college football coaches.

Les Miles is quite the college football coach himself. The LSU Tigers head man seamlessly took over for Saban when he left for the NFL and promptly won a National Championship three years later.

He's had an average season since, but he's done a heck of a job in the last two seasons.

The catch with Miles has always been his demeanor. Unlike Saban before him, he's never seemed the type to deal with an NFL team. Call it seriousness, maturity or both, but Miles has never been known to have either.

Apparently that is changing, and according to Mike Freeman of CBS Sports, the NFL is changing their tune on the coach.

Freeman writes:

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"The wacky, Mad Hatter rep made some NFL executives who considered hiring him nervous, I'm told. They weren't certain if he had the maturity to be an NFL head coach, so in the end, they stayed away."

"That is changing drastically. After interviews with several team executives, it has become clear Miles has vaulted near the top of some lists as the next hottest NFL coaching candidate."

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Freeman even talked to some executives who think Miles' style of coaching is perfect for the game football is evolving into.

He quoted one executive as saying:

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"He's the most intriguing coaching prospect I've seen in a long time. I think he has a great deal of talent and can deal with the modern athlete."

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The difference between the modern athlete and the modern professional athlete is where I become skeptical.

Miles' style goes over extremely well with this student athletes, as he relates to kids still growing up.

The NFL certainly has that, but it also has supreme professionals who don't respond well to that style of coaching.

The "players-coach," if you will, has become a hot topic in the NFL.

We see younger, more energetic coaches like Mike Tomlin, Raheem Morris and Jason Garrett having varying levels of success while appealing to their players.

And even veteran coaches like Bill Belichick, Rex Ryan and Sean Payton have great player-coach relationships that were nonexistent in the older days.

But a true college coach (Miles coached the Cowboys' tight ends for two years in in the late 1990s) is a completely different scenario.

NFL players aren't kids—they are men with their livelihood on the line every snap.

You could argue the same for college, but the games are two completely different things.

Les Miles is a great college football coach. There is a good chance he could even win his second National Championship this year (although I think they'll lose to Alabama on Nov. 5th).

But if he makes a jump to the NFL in the near future I simply don't see his tenure being any different that Saban's, Petrino's or even Pete Carroll's first try.

Eventually, he'll be back in the NCAA where he belongs.