Miles feels Tiger Stadium magic
By CARL DUBOIS
Advocate sportswriter
En route to Southeastern Conference Football Media Days in July, LSU senior defensive tackle Kyle Williams told his new coach, Les Miles, he would come to see Tiger Stadium as unlike any other place he had ever seen.
"He's right," Miles said Monday, two days after LSU's dramatic 20-17 overtime victory at home against Auburn.
Miles described his first Saturday night in Tiger Stadium as phenomenal.
"It was the first time I had seen anything like that," he said at his weekly news conference.
Miles played the roles of ticket salesman and football coach with equal aplomb, urging fans to fill the stadium for the next two home games -- both nonconference games, both 7 p.m. games -- beginning Saturday when North Texas visits.
Certainly, to use a word highlighted in Miles' lexicon, this is an LSU coach who believes in the magic of Tiger Stadium.
"It means a lot to the coaches and the players," he said. "It's specific to our team. It's specific to LSU, that environment. It's very special.
"If you talk to our players, talk to our coaches, it's what we want. It's what we need. It's an advantage to our team."
More important, it can affect the game, Miles said.
"It provides an atmosphere that gives our team the greatest chance to succeed," he said.
Auburn quarterback Brandon Cox called three timeouts at the line of scrimmage, two in the first half, as the LSU crowd roared to disrupt his attempts to improvise on play calls. A delay-of-game penalty and regrets over prematurely burning timeouts haunted Auburn in the wake of its first SEC loss of the season.
"When they can't hear," Miles said, "and they need a first down and they have to communicate a check -- and have to do it in a time frame that they can't get it done -- it costs them a timeout, unless they want to take a penalty.
"That's an advantage to our stadium."
Don't believe him? Ask Auburn players, as Alabama reporters did Saturday night.
"It was a loud crowd, and we couldn't hear out there," Cox told The Mobile Register.
Running back Kenny Irons echoed his quarterback's comments.
"The crowd noise affected us," Irons told the south Alabama newspaper.
LSU's first Saturday night game at home was supposed to be Sept. 3 vs. North Texas, but Hurricane Katrina forced a postponement. The next home game on the schedule, a week later against Arizona State, was played in Tempe, Ariz.
The next scheduled home game, against Tennessee, was played on a Monday night after Hurricane Rita made landfall in Louisiana.
LSU's first home game was Oct. 15, a 21-17 victory over Florida in the afternoon. A day game in Tiger Stadium, as every LSU fan knows, does not have the same mystique or mojo as a night game.
The players seem to agree. Their new coach saw his new home stadium at less than its best on the Monday night against Tennessee. Most LSU fans had to work that day and didn't have all day to tailgate, lubricate their vocal chords and get their game face on.
The crowd was loud for the Florida game, but nothing like the noise generated Saturday by a Tiger Stadium record crowd announced at 92,664.
Williams said Miles finally experienced what he told him about during the preseason -- a bona fide Saturday night in Tiger Stadium against a Top 25 opponent.
"I don't think it had quite lived up to its billing until Saturday," Williams said. "I think Saturday was when he really saw what Tiger Stadium is all about.
"When the stadium is full, when everybody's into the game, it's a huge advantage."
Miles sounded like a man fresh off a therapeutic tour of verdant pastures and golden wheat fields as he described the feelings of being inside the stadium on such a big night.
"It makes you smile when you take the field," Miles said. "You walk on the field with the idea that it may be the most beautiful place in America. For 100 yards of grass in our state, it may well be as heightened an emotional atmosphere as I've been around."
Skip Bertman, LSU's athletic director and former baseball coach, recalled the reactions of LSU defensive players after Auburn took a delay-of-game penalty late in the first half as Cox was unable to communicate a "check" to his teammates at the line of scrimmage.
"Kyle Williams and one other guy that I couldn't identify were so excited," Bertman said, "that they pointed up -- it was down by the student section -- and they pointed up at the students as if to say, 'You did it. You did it. You did it.'
"I don't think there's much doubt coach Miles and the players are very much into the crowd."
Williams said he could hear the noise level kick up as Cox tried to audible.
"It kept Cox from making a check that they had to do," Williams said, giving kudos to the fans. "They definitely needed to get some encouragement for that, because that was a direct result of what they were doing."
LSU center Rudy Niswanger said he likes crowd noise, even on the road, because it can make players perform better because they are focusing so much on hearing signals and on their environment, they're more mentally aware of what's going on.
Still, he said, a vocal crowd can wreak havoc on a visiting team's offense.
"Sometimes it's a bother," he said. "It's a problem. You have to go on a silent count. You have to concentrate that much harder to hear."
Bertman, who became LSU's baseball coach in 1984, said his first few seasons attending football games in Tiger Stadium didn't provide evidence of the reputation he'd heard about the crowd noise being unlike anywhere else in college football.
"When I first came here and people told me that, I was skeptical," Bertman said.
Even through the successful seasons of 1984, 1986 and 1987, he said, he doubted.
"The jury was still out," Bertman said.
Then, he said, Tommy Hodson threw a game-winning touchdown pass to defeat Auburn in 1988, causing the needles on a campus seismograph to jump wildly.
"I could feel the stadium shake, and I heard the noise," Bertman said.
Mike Archer, LSU's coach at the time, said he couldn't clearly hear offensive coordinator Ed Zaunbrecher on a headset on the sideline during the game-winning drive. Bertman, like Archer, said Tiger Stadium's design funnels noise down toward the field.
"I've always been impressed with the noise," Bertman said. "The noise in the boxes and the suites is not nearly as intense as it is down as you get into the middle and lower portions of the stadium.
"You can't hear yourself talk." Neither, apparently, can your teammates if you're the visiting team quarterback and LSU fans bring their 'A' game.
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Miles Feels Tiger Stadium Magic
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