The Thursday Thorns pieces offer up uncomfortable facts and truths in the sports world. News broke today about the College Football Hall of Fame lowering its coaching standards so some scrubs like Mike Leach, Les Miles, and other can get in. Doesn’t that just make you laugh? If any organization has to lower its benchmarks to increase admission, it’s already watering down the whole purpose of its existence. Fact!

Our disdain for Leach as a coach is well documented in this space; read on and see why. In many regards, we would not be here writing in our corner of the interwebs if not for Leach’s incompetence. We’re pretty sure he never even won a conference title in all his years at Texas Tech in the Big XII, at Washington State in the Pac-12, or at Mississippi State in the SEC. He only won in double digits twice in a 21-year coaching career.

What screams “Hall of Fame” about that? Nothing at all, not to mention his numerous personality flaws.

As for Miles, well, we’re convinced his 2007 “national title” was completely contrived, as explored here a long time ago. He certainly had a lot of success at LSU, but there are a lot of asterisks there, like there are with Nick Saban—since it’s clear only the $EC could enable them to win. Outside that cheatenous league, Miles managed a mere 31-39 record in the Big XII. Yet somehow, he was this awesome coach at LSU? Right.

We saw the same with Saban, of course, who got his hat handed him to in the B1G and the NFL, but both times he took $EC jobs, he was the Second Coming. So, what is it about that conference that turns schmucks into stars? Do the math, and as we always say, follow the money. Remember, Miles was a “Michigan Man”—long before now, when that moniker still meant something, of course, and even so, Ann Arbor passed hard.

[There are a lot of rumors and contradictions about Miles and Michigan out there; sort through it all yourself.]

That being said, both Leach and Miles won slightly less than 60 percent of their games at the college level: the equivalent of winning just six games out of every ten contests. That was already a low bar, and by lowering it even more, the College Football Hall of Fame becomes somewhat of a joke when you let coaches who couldn’t even finish 6-4 for their careers, to speak, into the not-so-hallowed halls of South Bend, IN.

Why even bother calling it the “Hall of Fame” when barely winning more than you lost is the threshold?