Trent Miles hopes for best, prepares for worst
Trent Miles’ decision to become a football coach wasn’t the result of some epiphany so much as a simple process of elimination.
First career choice: professional football player, a logical progression after college player.
Elimination day: “It was the day when I couldn’t outrun one of the safeties. I figured there’s no way a 5-foot-7, 170-pound receiver is going to play if you can’t run away from a safety.”
Second career choice: law enforcement, a logical progression after a degree in criminology.
Elimination day: “I was doing my ride-along with a police officer. I heard some gunshots. He said, ‘Stay in the car.’ He left, came back and I could see how nervous he was. He was sweating. I thought, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool that you can carry a gun. But they shoot back. I think I’ll be a football coach.’”
Miles’ chosen profession comes with its own perils. He is about to experience some of the the worst of them. He is the second football coach at Georgia State, which we can make a case might be worse than being the first football coach at Georgia State.
Bill Curry had to buy socks, shoulder pads and staplers. He had to convince a doubting populace that football could work at an in-town commuter school that struggled to support even basketball. But at least there were no expectations.
Only three years later, Miles must endure the program’s premature step up to FBS when it’s coming off a 1-10 season in FCS. The only win: over 0-11 Rhode Island. It’s not so much that Curry failed to build a foundation as it is he was still in process of mixing the cement.
“Our jobs are probably equally difficult,” said Curry, who’s enjoying retirement again. “There are no easy football jobs any more. There was a time when it was more sensible, like when Bobby Dodd could win seven games a year and nobody complained. Now it’s quick-fix culture. You’re either a hero or a jerk and there’s nothing in between.”
Miles is not going to win seven games — not this year, not next year. Probably not this year and next year combined. The move into the Sun Belt Conference was prompted by money, not logic, or certainly compassion. It’s a money grab, like the administration’s decision to schedule two road dismemberings against West Virginia and Alabama in the same season (in a span of four weeks).
Maybe one day, the athletic director can suit up for the fourth quarter in one of these 72-3 losses.
Miles understands what he has stepped into. Indiana State went 1-32 in the three seasons before his arrival and was on the verge of abandoning football altogether. Miles didn’t do any better in his first two years (1-22), but he followed that with three consecutive winning seasons (6-5, 6-5, 7-4). That arguably made him as worthy of a bronze statue on campus as Larry Bird.
“My first game at Indiana State, the first 20 minutes in the locker room before we went out, I had to show kids how to put the belt in their pants,” Miles said. “They had never put on game pants before.”
There are similar stories at Georgia State. In spring practice, Miles and his staff had to teach a quarterback how to take a snap from something other than a spread formation. “He had never taken the ball under center before,” he said.
He has diagrammed plays on the white board, then turned around and noticed the glazed look in the eyes of some players.
“When you have a fifth-year senior who can’t tell you where the ‘Mike’ linebacker is, you’re kind of like, ‘OK. So that’s where we are,’” Miles said. (For the uninitiated: It’s the middle linebacker, not a guy named Mike).
“I don’t take anything for granted. We’re teaching them how to lineup. Where to put their hand. They want to run and catch. I’m just trying to show them how to stand. It’s 101, man.”
This is why the Sun Belt will look like the NFC East.
This is why USA Today, in beginning its countdown of 125 FBS programs, began with Georgia State at No. 125.
“I don’t blame them,” Miles said, smiling. “How can you go from 1-10 in (FCS) and then go to (FBS) and not be considered No. 125?”
Give him credit for not being deluded, not providing any absolute timelines for win totals or bowl games that would almost certainly come back to bite him. He is confident the Panthers can get there — just don’t ask him when. The bigger issue might be how strongly he is supported by the administration and a thus far tepid student body.
“You’re taking a program that’s in its infantile stage and you’re not going through those stages, growing it through (FCS) and building it up to (FBS),” he said. “Most of these teams that are jumping up from (FCS) are national powers. We’re bypassing all of that.”
He has instituted new weight and nutrition programs. He has ridden players about how they talk, walk, dress, act.
“We’re trying to get them to see themselves as (FBS) players,” he said.
This is his 12th coaching stop in a 26-year career that has taken him through Oklahoma, Stanford, Notre Dame, Washington and the Green Bay Packers. He knows what success looks like. He believes he can sell Georgia recruits on creating an identity for Georgia State, as well as playing for an FBS school without leaving the state if they don’t make the cut at Georgia or Georgia Tech.
“I tell them, ‘Write your own tradition. Build your own culture,’” Miles said.
Three years later, Georgia State remains in the position of selling potential. That’s not going to change for a while.
