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He ate grass, for heavens sake. He ate grass, and we laughed.We came to love his idiosyncrasies, from that toddler clap to his play-calling guts to -- thanks, George and Ira Gershwin -- the way he wore his hat.No, they cant take that away from us. We loved it all because Les Miles could wink at us and keep winning. He came into LSU and produced a level of success never achieved by any of his 29 predecessors in Baton Rouge, and somehow, thats not enough.It is not something that Walter Camp decreed when he came up with the line of scrimmage and the center snap. It is not written in the 216 pages of the 2016 and 2017 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations. Only in the state of Louisiana is it carved into stone tablets and handed down from on high that LSU must win 10 games a season.No, check that. Miles won 114 games in 11? seasons and hes down at the Baton Rouge U-Haul buying boxes.On the very weekend that Miami, under new head coach Mark Richt, rose to No. 14 as Georgia, which fired Richt after he averaged a 10-3 record for 15 seasons, got humiliated at Ole Miss and fell out of the polls, LSU fired Miles so that it could hire someone more successful.Miles had a record of 114-34 (.770) with the Tigers. If youre looking for context of how good that is, consider that a career record of .600 makes a coach eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame. Consider that its better than the record of his predecessor, Nick Saban (48-16, .750). Or just consider this: Miles began this season as one of five active head coaches who had won a national championship.And then there were four, which include Saban, Urban Meyer of Ohio State and Jimbo Fisher of Florida State. Bob Stoops of 1-2 Oklahoma? Youre on the clock.On the very weekend that Tennessee extracted itself from the eight-year sinkhole it fell into after firing Phillip Fulmer, LSU decided that five losses in nine games is untenable. Think about that for just a minute, Tigers fans.Fulmer went 5-7 in 2008, one year after his ninth 10-win season in Knoxville, and Tennessee fired him. In 91 games since Tennessee fired Fulmer, the Vols are 48-43. That includes being 4-0 as we speak, after those 38 consecutive points against Florida that exorcised every ghost of the Derek Dooley era and the Lane Kiffin year.There is no guarantee that firing someone as successful as Miles will result in a better program. Its just as possible that LSU wont be able to hire a coach as successful as Miles. Theres a long list of schools that got rid of someone who was winning and got worse.Nebraska has gone 19 years since its national championship. More to this point, it has gone 17 years without a conference championship.Michigan, which has won more football games than any program anywhere, hasnt won the Big Ten championship in 12 years.Syracuse fired Paul Pasqualoni in 2004 after he had one losing record in 14 seasons. The Orange have had nine losing seasons since.That could neevvvvver happen at LSU. Ask head coaches about the best jobs in America, and the head-coaching job at LSU is second only to the guy who signs the Powerball checks. LSU is the only Power 5 school in a talent-rich state. Miles built upon Sabans strategy of laying a foundation at home. For more than a decade, it has taken a court order and a crowbar to convince a five-star Louisiana recruit to cross state lines. The state has served Miles well. Its the vice versa that LSU doesnt remember.When did the state of Louisiana fall in love with Saban? Not when he won the national championship in 2003. No, it was two years earlier, when Saban brought home the SEC title, the Tigers first since 1988. Trust me, no one is making documentaries about LSU football in the 1990s.If you dig at the root of this issue, thats who you will find: Saban, the man who broke Tiger hearts when he landed at Alabama only two years after leaving LSU. Miles has matched the one national championship and two SEC championships that Saban won in Baton Rouge. But since Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa, he has won four national championships and four SEC championships.No matter how much Miles won in Death Valley, LSU fans still looked over their shoulder at Saban. Wherever Miles took the Tigers, he would have to go through Saban once a year to get there. And through the 2011 regular season, Miles gave as good as he got. When LSU won that 9-6 overtime fistfight that season, Miles held a 3-2 edge on Saban.But Alabama embarrassed LSU 21-0 in the BCS National Championship rematch two months later, and something seemed to shift. Sabans teams beat Miles teams the next four seasons, twice by double figures, twice by late-game scores. You decide which hurt the most.The LSU offense is stuck these days, and Miles has been too slow to fix it. Anyone who can read game scores can understand that. Miles had the chance to kick offensive coordinator Cam Cameron to the curb after last season and he didnt do it. When the offense continued to sputter this season, Cameron got kicked to the curb, all right. Where he landed on Miles.My guess is Miles would have fixed it by the end of this season, if not before. No one at LSU wanted to wait. Instead, dont be surprised if Tigers fans wait a long time to return to where Miles had taken them. 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And spoken is defined as one calling the other to inquire, no more, no less. RIO DE JANEIRO -- I came here to the land of sand, futebol and rhythm, on my maiden voyage to South America, expecting very little.But fear not.You arent about to be subjected to yet another foreigners rant about the accommodations, logistics, traffic, insects, crime or any of the other things jittery Americans like myself have railed about for months in advance of these Olympic Games and with inevitably greater volume since they started.Im talking about the basketball.If I may borrow from Dick Vitales dictionary: Rio was supposed to be Blowout City.For all the big names who stayed back in the States, your LeBrons and Currys and Westbrooks, Mike Krzyzewskis Team USA arrived on Brazilian soil 13 days ago with a 12-man roster that was still plenty drool-worthy, headlined by Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Carmelo Anthony,?with Paul George as the sixth man.Who else at these Olympics was going to compete with this squad if what amounted to Coach Ks B team had just rolled to an 8-0 sweep at the 2014 FIBA World Cup in Spain by an average victory margin of 33 points?I was by no means alone in my pessimism, either. Folks far smarter than I am about international basketball were equally convinced that the Las Vegas oddsmakers who billed the Americans as 1-to-20 locks to scoop up all the gold medals got the pre-tournament calculus exactly right.I think they are by far the favorites to win it, San Antonio Spurs veteran?Manu Ginobili told me early in the tournament when asked to assess the gulf between Team USA and the rest of the field, 12 years removed from the stunning gold that Ginobili, Luis Scola & Co. brought home to Argentina from Athens in 2004.For sure they stretched again the difference with the rest of the world.Said Scola minutes before our chat with Manu: For today, they just got too much talent.Then there was Serbian coach?Sasha Djordjevic?after his team played its second Olympic game: Its a long way to go til we will see another team beat USA.Four nights later, Sashas Serbs almost did. They fell just one Bogdan Bogdanovic 3-pointer from the wing away from forcing overtime against the disheveled Americans in a 94-91 defeat.There are indeed lots of issues freaking out visitors to Brazil on a daily basis at these Games, but heres maybe the biggest shocker so far at Rio 2016: Playing the United States in mens basketball isnt currently on that list.FIBA [basketball] is a little bit different, Denver Nuggets forward Joffrey Lauvergne said Sunday after France became the third successive Team USA opponent to flirt with an upset of the heavy, heavy favorites in the fourth quarter. Whats happening in this tournament shows that maybe someones gonna beat them -- and we all hope its gonna be us.With so much focus back home on the Americans inability to keep opposing guards out of the paint, deal with free-flowing offenses and their pick-and-roll nuances or simply make themselves more difficult to guard, its been easy to miss how refreshingly filled with surprises pool play was, after so little drama was expected going in.In addition to the United States stunningly finding itself in three straight competitive games, Australia hammered France on the opening day, Croatia upset Spain one day later, host Brazil dumped Spain into an 0-2 hole, then Argentina outdueled its lifelong Brazilian rivals in an unforgettable, double-overtime classic. And all of that preceded the bonus of unheralded Nigeria somehow toppling the Croatians to keep all six teams in Group B in contention for the knockout round until the final day of pool play.As a result, anything seems possible?heading into Wednesdays quarterfinals, though you can safely assume that the poor Argentines, for all their collective know-how, would have preferred to draw anyone other than the Americans in the final eight.The luxury [other nations] have is theyve been together for so long, George said Sunday after the France scare, furthering his status as the most outspoken member of Team USA at these Games. They just read each other so well. I think thats the biggest thing that really separates us from them.There was grave concern in various corners of the international basketball community that the separation was going the wrong way. And dramatically so.?Spain failed to progress beyond the quarterfinals as the host country in the 2014 Worlds and sports an aging, short-handed squad in Brazil, with Marc Gasol still recovering from foot surgery. Argentina has an even older team than the Spaniards with little in the pipeline to succeed its Golden Generation of cornerstone players, while Brazil is likewise relying on a number of 30-somethings and missing two key big men, Tiago Splitteer and Anderson Varejao, because of injuries.dddddddddddduddenly, though, new challengers are emerging.Provided that pool play was a reliable guide, Australia looks like the second-best team in the field, even?without?prized prospects Ben Simmons or Dante Exum in uniform to join the established core of Andrew Bogut, Patty Mills, Matthew Dellavedova, Joe Ingles and David Andersen.You look at it selfishly, from an Australian standpoint, and by the next Olympics, we could have all our team being players that play in the NBA, said former Seton Hall star Andrew Gaze, who represented the Aussies in three Olympics as a pro and five overall before moving into his current role as a TV broadcaster. And when you get that daily experience of playing against those guys, you get more accustomed to not being in awe of them.Croatia has turned heads with its Dario & Mario Show starring incoming Philadelphia rookie Dario Saric and Orlandos Mario Hezonja. Theres presumably more to come from the Croats, too, with Junes No. 4 overall pick,?Dragan Bender, destined to join them for the 2019 World Cup in China and under-16 sensation Luka Samanic ranking as arguably Europes top teen.Our neighbors to the north, meanwhile, have to be mentioned when talking national teams with real potential, even though Canada was twice just one win shy of qualifying for these Olympics and lost both times, first to a starless Venezuela squad completely devoid of NBA talent and then to the favored French last month.If GM Steve Nash and coach Jay Triano can get everyone eligible on the floor at the same time, Canada versus Team USA would eventually be must-see, with the likes of Andrew Wiggins, Tristan Thompson, Cory Joseph, Kelly Olynyk, Trey Lyles, Dwight Powell, Nik Stauskas, Anthony Bennett and incoming rookie Jamal Murray in red and white.Yet the inspiration to look ahead, for the record, comes from some of the wise, old heads from the FIBA universe mentioned above.Amid all of Team USAs struggles to play as a unit, establish a pecking order and impose its defensive will on the countries that know how to execute and never stop moving, several of the famous names we consulted cautioned that the competition currently underway might not stay so watchable.Not if the Americans start gelling like a team with that much talent conceivably could at any moment.First of all, its because they have way more talent, size, athleticism ... everything more than us, Ginobili said. I think they had a period of five, six years in which they ... I dont know if its they didnt care enough or they didnt respect the rest [of the world] enough. But now they got past that stretch -- far.Said Frances Boris Diaw, even?after his team looked so good with Tony Parker sidelined by a reported toe injury: You gotta have a near-perfect game to beat them. And we didnt.Added Gaze: When you see the way international players are having an impact on the NBA, its now at the very least conceivable to think of a scenario whereby you could be very competitive. Were at a stage where an accident can happen. Whereas, I think, if you go back to 92, I mean, we were just there trying to get an autograph.But there is that aura thats still there. It may not be as strong as it was years ago, but there still is an aura there. And make no mistake: They do a good job exploiting it.After doing his own math and estimating that hes been playing alongside Ginobili, Carlos Delfino and Andres Nocioni on one Argentinean team or another for 22 years, Scola continues to believe that the United States is the only team that can decide how the United States will do in international competition.There was this time that the U.S. kind of got bored of the FIBA thing, Scola said. And they didnt put a lot of effort, didnt put a lot of work on it. They didnt really commit to it. And those years they lost. And then they said: Stop. Enough. So I believe its pretty much up to the U.S.If U.S. takes this seriously and they really put work into it and they put their minds and their bodies into it, its going to be very, very hard to beat them any year they come and play. They have so many good players. They have so many athletes. The difference of the athleticism between those guys and everybody else is very, very big. So if they really focus on it, its going to be very hard to beat them in any tournament. Its been like that forever.Its been like that for a dozen years. Until last week. To the delight of anyone weary of Blowout City.To the glee of anyone who wanted to see -- get this -- an actual tournament.? Youth NFL Jerseys China Cheap Jerseys 2020 Cheap NFL Gear Camo China NFL Jerseys Wholesale Jerseys 2020 Cheap Jerseys China Cheap Jerseys Online ' ' '