There aren’t many coaches around the nation with 100 wins at their current job. There are fewer still that are anywhere near as divisive as Les Miles.

Miles just wrapped up his 10th year at LSU, a disappointing 8-5 campaign. During the season, he won his 100th game with the Tigers, one of just a handful of coaches around the nation to accomplish that feat. That Miles did it in fewer than 10 years is even more impressive; he’s averaging more than 10 wins per season. Fewer coaches still can claim that.

Yet Miles gets picked apart for a variety of things every year. His strict adherence to his offensive philosophies, some questionable moments in big games, his inability to find a quarterback and more.

There is perhaps no coach in the nation with Miles’ resume — which includes a national championship and two SEC titles — that gets picked apart more.

Is it deserved? Has Miles underachieved at LSU, or is he meeting and exceeding expectations every year, giving LSU fans a coach for which they should be thankful?

Part of the reason that Miles faces the criticism he does is surely because of his predecessor, the now-hated Nick Saban of Alabama. While Miles has delivered plenty of wins and that 2007 national championship, it’s more than reasonable that there are some LSU fans who still wish Saban had never left. After all, the coach has built a juggernaut at Alabama, and he’s the one that laid the foundation that Miles has built upon to turn LSU into a national powerhouse.

There’s also the argument that the 2007 championship team was mostly Saban’s doing. After all, Miles took over in 2005, meaning that team’s upperclassmen were all recruited by Saban. Glenn Dorsey, Early Doucet, Craig Steltz, Matt Mauck, Jacob Hester and others were all Saban recruits. While Miles’ recruits made up the depth of the team and several of the team’s contributors, there’s no doubt that the leaders were all Saban’s guys.

The counter to that: So what? Miles has recruited just as well as Saban did at LSU, and he’s done it for longer. In Miles 11 recruiting cycles, only three of those classes have fallen outside of the top-10 nationally, and he’s hung right with the Alabama recruiting juggernaut for the last several years, even as the Tide have rattled off title after title.

There’s also the fact that Miles put together a team more talented than any of Saban’s teams at LSU, the 2011 SEC champion. Yes, that team fell short in the national title game to Alabama in embarrassing fashion, getting shut out in a rematch of the Game of the Century.

That loss can be blamed, at least in part, on LSU’s inability to find and develop a quarterback under Miles. There are multiple reasons you can point to there. Louisiana, where the Tigers do most of their recruiting work, isn’t exactly fertile ground for quarterbacks. From 2005-15, there have only been three quarterbacks ranked among the state’s top-10 players in a given year. LSU has landed all three; Ryan Perriloux infamously flamed out, Jordan Jefferson was one of the less-than-stellar quarterbacks on the 2011 team and Brandon Harris is still a work in progress.

The blame for not developing those players and others properly does fall on Miles and his staff. Despite several high-profile coordinators and quarterbacks coaches, the only QBs to star under Miles were two Saban recruits (JaMarcus Russell and Mauck) and a junior college transfer (Zach Mettenberger). And, in the year that Mettenberger took off, LSU’s defense had been rocked by early departures to the NFL, negating one of the best offenses in school history.

However, the criticism that Miles stubbornly adheres to one philosophy is off base. He simply works with what he has, and for the majority of his tenure that’s been a bruising running game that lacked a quarterback to complement it. Miles had no problem allowing Cam Cameron to air it out in 2013 with Mettenberger, Odell Beckham Jr. and Jarvis Landry, and the same goes for 2006 when JaMarcus Russell was LSU’s star quarterback.

Whether or not Miles has overachieved or underachieved, given the lack of a quarterback for much of his tenure, depends on your perspective. Either he’s done exceedingly well to average 10 wins per season while often not having a reliable passing game, or he’s missed out on potential SEC and national titles by not being able to find a passer. Given Miles’ success — he has as many 10-win seasons in his LSU career as the Tigers had in program history before he arrived — it’s hard not to tilt toward the former.

This might be hard for some to remember, but LSU was not a national power going back less than 20 years. In Between Charles McLendon and Saban, LSU toggled between winning eight or nine games some years, then finishing with a losing record for a few seasons. Prior to Saban’s arrival, LSU’s longest streak of making a bowl game was five years; Miles has doubled that streak on his own without ever missing out on the postseason (or even coming close to missing it).

After Saban left, it would have been in line with program history to drop back toward mediocrity in the SEC. Instead, Miles has kept it as a nationally relevant team, a destination for elite talent, NFL scouts and national television broadcasts alike.

Thinking that LSU could have won another national title or two is fine and likely a fair assessment. That doesn’t mean that Miles hasn’t done great work at LSU, keeping the Tigers in the national conversation every season and turning them into a full-on college football giant.