We meet again: Kansas coach Les Miles, Oklahoma’s former tormentor, is at his best with ‘blue-collar’ teams
Dave Hunziker had been in his new position as Oklahoma State’s radio play-by-play voice a little more than a month when first-year coach Les Miles called and invited him to dinner. As the pair of newbies ate Mexican food and began developing their relationship in August 2001, Hunziker asked Miles to name the biggest challenge he faced.
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Miles didn’t hesitate.
“Creating a winning mood,” he responded.
Oklahoma State football had experienced one winning season in the previous 12. The Cowboys always had toiled in the shadow of their in-state rival, and the window for escaping that shadow seemingly had slammed shut. Entering Miles’ first season, OU was the defending national champion, with Bob Stoops having quickly restored glory to the Sooners’ program following a rare period of misery.
“You create a winning mood by putting quality teams out there, coaching guys up, putting them in situations to win,” Hunziker said. “And then also by how you interact with the fans and how you portray your program. He did all of those things.”
Miles’ brash, why-not-us attitude uplifted the Oklahoma State players and invigorated a distressed fan base. Then he produced results, shocking the mighty Sooners in each of his first two seasons in Stillwater and setting things in motion for what has now, under Mike Gundy, become one of the most consistently successful Big 12 programs.
Miles’ attitude irritated Sooner Nation about as much as it inspired Oklahoma State. Saturday, Miles will coach against Oklahoma for the first time in nearly 15 years. As Kansas’ first-year coach, he faces an even greater restoration project than he did at Oklahoma State. The Jayhawks cycled through three coaches — four if you include 2014 interim coach Clint Bowen — and went 18-90 overall, with just five Big 12 wins, between 2010 and 2018. Kansas hasn’t beaten Oklahoma since 1997 and is 27-76-6 (.275) all-time in the series.
Miles coached LSU for 11 seasons and change — winning a national title in 2007 — but perhaps he’s more comfortable as an underdog. The Jayhawks are 2-3 but stunned 20-point favorite Boston College in a 48-24 rout three weeks ago. That was Kansas’ first road win against a Power 5 opponent since 2008, a streak of 48 games.
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“I think there’s something to be said for coaching blue-collar teams and coaching blue-chip teams,” said Sam Mayes, an Oklahoma State offensive lineman for all four years of Miles’ tenure there. “Les Miles goes to LSU and wins, but then you saw it drop off a little bit because that’s not the best version of himself.
“The best version of Les Miles is leading the Bad News Bears.”
With three games left in the 2000 season, Oklahoma State officials announced coach Bob Simmons would be let go at the end of the season. Dirk Koetter was seen as the likely replacement. Koetter won 10 games in both the 1999 and 2000 seasons at Boise State, helping lay the groundwork for the program’s resounding success still enjoyed to this day. Koetter even attended the Bedlam game in Stillwater on Nov. 25, 2000.
But after Dennis Franchione turned down Arizona State and took the Alabama job, Koetter reneged on Oklahoma State and accepted the Sun Devils job. Oklahoma State hired Miles instead, and he brought on former OSU quarterback Mike Gundy — another coaching candidate at the time — as offensive coordinator. Miles was a former Oklahoma State assistant who was the Dallas Cowboys’ tight ends coach when he was hired.
That first season got off to a rocky start, with a season-opening 17-9 loss at Southern Miss. The Cowboys lost painfully close conference games to Missouri (41-38) and to eventual Big 12 champ Colorado (22-19) before finally winning their first league game Nov. 17 at Baylor. But slowly throughout that season, Miles had started making believers of his players.
“His energy was infectious,” said then-OSU defensive back Ricklan Holmes. “It rubbed off on our entire team.”
At 3-7, few gave those Cowboys a chance to win their regular-season finale at No. 3 Oklahoma. The Sooners needed a win to reach the Big 12 title game, where they’d presumably get a rematch with top-ranked Nebraska and have a chance to punch their ticket to a second consecutive national championship game.
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The day before Bedlam, Colorado stunned Nebraska, meaning OU’s opponent in the Big 12 championship wouldn’t be Eric Crouch and the mighty Huskers. To that point, Oklahoma never had lost a game in Norman under Stoops. Everything was lined up perfectly for another shot at the national title. There was one problem: Oklahoma State wasn’t going to lay down.
The year before — in Simmons’ final game — OSU nearly ruined the Sooners’ national championship season in a 12-7 game in Stillwater. “We knew we could compete with them,” Holmes said.
They were about the only ones who believed they would actually win, though, right up until Josh Fields’ 14-yard touchdown pass landed in Rashaun Woods’ hands with 1:36 left to play, giving Oklahoma State a 16-13 victory. It is perhaps the most shocking result in Bedlam history.
“It was definitely a spark for the program,” Woods said this week. “It reinforced what we were already starting to believe. It reinforced to the public that it could be done and that the program was moving in the right direction. All of those things culminated in what the program is doing now. A whole lot of games have been won since.”
Because Oklahoma State’s 2001 season was over, many of the in-state players went home from Norman. But the out-of-state guys rode the bus back to Stillwater that night.
Oklahoma State’s basketball team had beaten North Texas, but the 7,000-plus fans stayed in their Gallagher-Iba Arena seats, waiting for the football team to return. Miles and the smaller group of football players strode onto the court about 40 minutes after the basketball game ended.
“We walk in and the fans were going nuts,” recalled Mayes, who is from Ohio. “The funny thing, though, was that the 40 of us who were left, most of us hadn’t even stepped on the field that night. Those dudes had gone home already.
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“I think the whole town, the student body, everybody was just shocked that we found a way to get it done.”
Miles addressed the crowd that night, yelling, according to The Oklahoman: “We really enjoyed singing our alma mater to the fans at Owen Field! This is a great day to be a Cowboy fan!”
The next week, Oklahoman columnist Berry Tramel wrote: “The upset came from nowhere. Nothing in the Big 12’s young history comes close on the shock-o-meter. Nothing in Bob Stoops’ regime indicated the Sooners were ripe. Nothing in OSU’s recent history indicated it was capable of surprise.”
Miles had first gotten the players to believe. Now, the fan base believed, too.
The next month, in the run-up to OU’s Cotton Bowl appearance, Stoops reportedly said some schools were happy with four wins. That perturbed Miles, who responded a few months later at a Cowboy Caravan event in Tulsa, saying the Cowboys should have won by more.
Then, the next fall, Oklahoma State did it again.
Once again, Oklahoma entered the Bedlam game as a national title contender. Once again, those dreams were dashed by Miles’ pesky Cowboys.
“I went by practice the day before Thanksgiving and was just kind of hanging out on the sideline,” Hunziker said. “I already felt pretty good about Oklahoma State’s chances of winning that game, but I left that practice firmly convinced they were going to win. The guys were so confident, and they could give you the reasons why: ‘We’re gonna run the ball, then we’re gonna throw it over their head over and over again, and they’re not gonna be able to stop us.’
“And that’s exactly what happened.”
Fields threw for 357 yards and four touchdowns. Woods caught 12 passes for 226 yards and three scores. Oklahoma State running back Tatum Bell rushed for 106 yards. This time, Oklahoma State left no doubt. The Cowboys won 38-28, although it wasn’t that close. OSU led 35-6 early in the third quarter.
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“Everybody kept saying that we got away with a lucky catch the year before,” Holmes said. “We took it upon ourselves to make sure we got the game out of reach so people would understand that we were a good football team.”
Those two Bedlam wins inspired Boone Pickens to make his first massive donation to the football program. His $70 million donation in 2003 resulted in Oklahoma State naming its football stadium after the oil tycoon. Before he died last month, Pickens donated more than $300 million to Oklahoma State athletics.
“What Boone Pickens did from a support standpoint, facilities, all those things, was a huge accelerator,” Hunziker said. “But (the early Bedlam success) changed everything from a cultural standpoint, changing how people think, giving the fan base confidence and pride.”
“It was the beginning of the transformation.”
Entering 2003 Bedlam, Oklahoma was ranked first and Oklahoma State 14th in the BCS standings. In the lead-up to the game, Miles said, “They’re the best team in college football, we’re told.”
Later that week, Miles said: “Two teams are going to play. One is maybe the best team in college football, and the other one is a darn good football team. We’re going to play to figure out which one is which.”
Just before kickoff, Miles said Let ’er rip! to ABC sideline reporter Lynn Swann and walked away with swagger.
Oklahoma then trounced the Cowboys 52-9 on Owen Field, restoring what the Sooners believe is the rightful status of that rivalry. Following the game, Stoops acknowledged he was annoyed by some of Miles’ comments that week.
“I believe there’s enough sarcasm in the media that coaches shouldn’t promote it,” Stoops said that day.
Mike Stoops, Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator at the time, told The Athletic last year that Miles’ bravado “just irritated all of us.”
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But Oklahoma’s resounding win that day — and even the Sooners’ overwhelming success in Bedlam since then — didn’t diminish the impact of Miles’ public confidence.
“I know a lot of OU fans think, ‘Yeah, we shut him up,’” Hunziker said. “But really, the outcome of that game didn’t matter as much as, for our fans, after all these years, we were finally bucking up to those guys. We clearly weren’t scared of the Sooners anymore.”
The next year, No. 19 Oklahoma State lost the Bedlam Series 38-35 in Stillwater. The Cowboys had trailed the second-ranked Sooners by two scores twice in the third quarter but kept fighting back until a 49-yard Jason Ricks field goal attempt missed wide left.
After that game — which would turn out to be Miles’ last Bedlam tilt — he was fired up in the news conference, proclaiming with a raspy voice: “I’m proud of my football team. My football team, I’ll take them around and I’ll play any sucker in this country. I like this team. I like the fight in this ballclub. I like the resolve.”
Mayes said the players didn’t pay much attention to Miles’ news conference antics. This was, after all, an era before social media made seeing such clips easier for players.
“The bravado that he had publicly, though, got the fans riled up, and it got butts in the seats for sure,” Mayes said. “There were more people coming to the games and we noticed that, so I guess in a weird way, yeah, it did impact us.”
“A lot of the stuff he said in press conferences, he’d say in team meetings,” Holmes said. “We were drawn to him the same way the media is drawn to him.”
Miles left Oklahoma State following the 2004 season for LSU, where he replaced Nick Saban. He continued his quirky ways in Baton Rouge in a job in which such antics were amplified simply because of LSU’s status in the SEC spotlight.
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LSU went 114-34 (.770) during Miles’ time there, winning the 2007 national championship and playing for another title in 2011. But he was fired four games into the 2016 season.
Nicknamed “The Mad Hatter,” Miles spent the 2017 and ’18 seasons out of coaching before Kansas athletic director Jeff Long hired him. The Jayhawks had become a Big 12 and national laughingstock over the past decade. And maybe a situation like that suits Miles just fine.
Beginning with Miles’ first season in Stillwater, Oklahoma State has reached 16 bowl games. The Cowboys have won 10 games six times since 2010, and during their Big 12 championship season in 2011, they finally saw their all-time winning percentage creep above .500.
At Big 12 media day in July, Miles was asked how Kansas’ talent compared to the talent he inherited at Oklahoma State in 2001.
“I think we have a better talent base here at Kansas than I had when I went with Oklahoma State,” Miles said. “I think you will see that this Kansas team is much more talented than their record shows.”
When Mayes — now a drive-time radio host on The Franchise in Oklahoma City — ran into his former coach at Big 12 media day, Miles pointed behind Mayes toward TCU senior offensive lineman Lucas Niang, who is considered one of the top O-line prospects for the 2020 NFL Draft.
“I’ve got guys like that on campus,” Miles told Mayes that day. “You might not know they’re there. But I’ve got guys like that.”
What a stark contrast from 2013 Big 12 media day, when then-Jayhawks coach Charlie Weis sat on the main stage and infamously described his recruiting strategy as telling prospects: “Have you looked at that pile of crap out there? Have you taken a look at that? So if you don’t think you can play here, where do you think you can play?”
Despite the big Boston College win, this young season has had plenty of rough patches, too. Kansas lost 12-7 at home to Coastal Carolina in Week 2 and is entering the Oklahoma game off a 51-14 loss at TCU. The No. 6 Sooners are a 35-point favorite Saturday.
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“He always made us believe that we can do this,” Mayes said. “We took his attitude and personality onto the field with us.
“He’s a blue-collar coach and, I think, one of college football’s all-time greatest motivators.”
(Top photo of Miles and Bob Stoops: Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)
