Coach Les Miles gambled -- and won -- five times on fourth down as LSU rallied over Florida, while the Tigers' West Coast rivals went belly up

Coach Les Miles. Bob Rosato/SI

The rebranding took place before our very eyes. Going into his team's gutsy 28-24 comeback victory over a talented, desperate Florida squad last Saturday night, LSU coach Les Miles was seen, truth be told, as a highly paid caretaker. He was better than competent -- witness the 5-0 start in 2007; examine his identical 11-2 records in '05 and '06. But Miles was also fortunate, as South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier recently reminded the world, to have had so much talent bequeathed to him by his predecessor, Nick Saban.

Even as Miles delivered top 10 finishes in his first two seasons in Baton Rouge, the Tigers' faithful could not bring themselves to forgive him for the big ones that got away: a come-from-ahead overtime loss to Tennessee in 2005 and a loss to Florida last year, in which a freshman named Tim Tebow, in a supporting role, outshined JaMarcus Russell, the No. 1 pick in the '07 NFL draft.

Now Miles will be known for his nerve -- although that wasn't the noun of choice on Saturday night at Tiger Stadium. Tigers running back Jacob Hester put it this way: "He's definitely got some serious, you know...." As one admiring blogger put it, Miles has "huge onions." For the game's most remarkable statistic wasn't Florida's 156 rushing yards against the nation's top-ranked defense, which had yielded 195 yards on the ground all season . It was LSU's going for it on fourth down five times -- and making it on all five.

When it was over, Miles sounded like someone who'd had a good night at the casino. Explaining why he felt compelled to roll the dice on all those fourth downs -- twice on the team's game-winning touchdown drive -- Miles spoke of "a feeling" and "a hankering" that his serial gambles would pay off. Hester would convert two of those fourth downs, finishing with 106 yards on 23 carries and the winning score. At least someone was representing the Evangel Christian Academy in Shreveport, La., on Saturday night.

That's where Hester played his high school ball -- where he took handoffs and caught passes from his friend John David Booty. While Hester was softening up Florida's front seven, Booty was two time zones away at the L.A. Coliseum, turning in the worst game of his USC career. After throwing two interceptions in a narrow escape at Washington on Sept. 29, he uncorked four more picks in dragging his team to a mind-boggling, 24-23 loss to Stanford.

True, the Trojans could still contend for the national title (although they will most likely be underdogs at No. 2 Cal on Nov. 10). For now USC must cope with the lingering bitterness of an upset that ranks with Appalachian State over Michigan. Having been outscored 141-51 in its previous three Pac-10 games, the Cardinal was a 41-point underdog, playing without its injured starting quarterback, facing the No. 1 team in the coaches' poll, going into the stadium where USC had won 35 straight, doing battle with a juggernaut whose coach was disinclined to show mercy. That's because Pete Carroll judged Jim Harbaugh, Stanford's first-year coach, impertinent last March when he offered that Carroll would soon return to the NFL, and later said that the Trojans might be the most talented squad in the history of college football.

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