Link: Is Les Miles Ready for the Hardest Job in College Football?

Sliced avocado, mixed greens, walnuts, grapes, dried cranberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and red onions. These ingredients are gathered in a bowl, tossed in a rice wine vinaigrette and, on this cold night at 23rd Street Brewery, placed in front of Kathy Miles. “I love the dressing,” she tells restaurant owner Matt Llewellyn. This meatless salad is a new menu item at Lawrence’s trademark restaurant, and it is selling well, Llewellyn says, mainly because most patrons add protein, raising the price from $10.99 to $13.99. Weeks ago, Kathy’s husband, the new Kansas head football coach, walked into this place for the first time and, after scouring the menu, created his own dish. “Here’s what I want,” he told Llewellyn, and with that, the Les Miles Vegan Salad was born.

Les Miles has a new diet. He has a new job, having been fired from an SEC football powerhouse only to land at a Big 12 basketball school. He also has a new mannerism: He no longer publicly utters the three letters inscribed on the national championship ring he brandishes on his right hand, instead referring to LSU as “my last stop” or “the place I was last”. Miles, now 65, is about 20 pounds lighter than you last saw him on the sideline, and for the first time in his life, he is regularly wearing his most hated color, a red that is a few shades away from the ones worn by his career archrivals Alabama (as head coach at LSU) and Ohio State (as a player and assistant at Michigan).

But the new Kansas coach is still quirky old Les Miles, the guy who during his two years out of football starred in beer commercials and appeared in two feature films; the guy who produced hilariously perplexing press conference soundbites by butchering the English language; the guy who chewed on grass in tense sideline moments and wore his white hat so oddly atop his head that he earned the nickname “the Mad Hatter”, which dovetailed with his penchant for fourth-down risks and fake field goals. He scaled a downtown Baton Rouge building, kissed a pig at an annual on-campus event and, during news conferences, did everything from answering a reporter’s ringing cellphone to saluting Columbus Day. A retired Miles had the makings of Dos Equis’s next “most interesting man in the world” or the replacement for Lee Corso as the comedic star of ESPN's College GameDay.

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None of this mentions the most troublesome issue, a grim roster outlook laid out by the new staff's in-house evaluation: Kansas won’t be able to fill its allotment of 85 scholarships until 2022 at the very earliest, thanks to attrition, the shortsighted recruiting tactics of past regimes and the NCAA’s two-year-old 25-scholarship limit for each signing class. Hecklinski spent two weeks while over Christmas break creating a comprehensive roster analysis, organized in a thick, three-ring binder that sits atop his desk. “I kept looking at it like, this can’t be right,” says Hecklinski. “Toughest roster situation I’ve seen.”

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