… Species and groups of species gradually disappear, one after another, first from one spot, then from another, and finally from the world. — Charles Darwin, The Origin

Ed Orgeron was asked about an old boss on Wednesday, and he talked about a man who has changed since he coached with him.

“He’s gone to the spread offense now,” said Orgeron, LSU’s interim head coach, of Lane Kiffin, the Alabama offensive coordinator who Orgeron worked under when Kiffin was head coach at both Tennessee and USC. “Obviously, he still does a tremendous job of mixing up the run and the pass, but it’s all quarterback runs now. We were never quarterback runs at USC. It was all under center. Now it’s a lot of pistol, varying formations, mostly the spread offense now.”

Indeed, Kiffin has evolved his offensive approach. And, by extension, so has his current boss, Alabama head coach Nick Saban. A couple of years ago, it would have been very difficult to imagine a Saban team in the spread as he was a “pro-style” coach.

But times change. Offenses change. Players change.

And coaches better darn well change, too.

If there is one big-picture takeaway for the upcoming LSU-Bama game, that’s it. What coaches are in this game and thriving, and what coaches are not part of this game. That’s a result of what coaches were willing to evolve and adjust with the game, and what coach stubbornly refused and found himself perhaps unfit for survival.

It’s football Darwinism. Saban and Kiffin have evolved. Thus, Saban remains the dominant figure in college football, and Kiffin has rehabbed his good name as a coach. For that matter, Orgeron has also learned from mistakes and evolved and, as a result, finds himself within reach of one of college football’s premier jobs at LSU.

Les Miles, meanwhile, never changed and he won’t be coaching Saturday. One can argue that the game evolved past him, and he didn’t adjust.

Like any analogy, this one has its limits. Things in football don’t go extinct, they simply go dormant. But if you are to evolve with the game, you have to recognize when something is going dormant and when it’s time to bring it back and how to evolve with what’s current.

Got all that?

As an example, I present the old-school option offense.

Truth of the matter is, nobody has ever figured out how to stop it, whether you talk about the Houston veer, the wishbone and its variations or the Nebraska I-formation option.

Those offenses are as hard to stop now as they were when they were dreamed up in the 1950s. What killed the offense from college football’s mainstream is that it never caught on at the pro level — too much risk to a quarterback — and because of that, top prospects didn’t want to play in an offense that didn’t translate to a pro career.

Meanwhile, programs like where Orgeron got his start, Miami, were stressing a pro-style offense that would prepare top players for the next level.

So by the mid-90s, if you were stuck running the option, you weren’t getting the top athletes and you were no longer able to compete at the highest level. The only programs that still run it are ones like the service academies that use it to make up for a talent gap.

The offense didn’t stop being effective. It simply stopped being something you could recruit players to play. It wasn’t the language of the game at the moment.

That, it can be argued, is what caught up to Miles.

He played power football even as everybody else was changing. By the late 2000s, the players he recruited were growing up in the spread and weren’t necessarily speaking the language of the I-formation, which to them must have seemed like their fathers’ offense.

To his credit, Miles tried. LSU recruited dual-threat quarterbacks — Jordan Jefferson and Anthony Jennings, to name a couple — but he could never quite commit to a new-fangled spread the way Alabama has done this year with Jalen Hurts. It seemed like Miles would recruit spread personnel but revert to his power-football instincts.

If you evolve, you can’t evolve half way or you end up with an identity crisis.

Saban has had no such issue making a transition to the modern game.

The Alabama coach surprised some when he hired the brash, young Kiffin as offensive coordinator in 2014. But it perhaps sent the signal that he recognized it was time to usher in some new ideas to his “process.” And here we are in his third season, and the Crimson Tide is spreading people out like Oregon.

It isn’t Kiffin’s signature offense, but to his and Saban’s credit, they recognized that now is the time to go to it. After all, many in the NFL run it, and the Alabama version sort of resembles what you see in the pro game.

So Alabama and Saban have changed. The results have not.

Of course, offensive schemes never really die. Option football is back as an element of many versions of the spread. And, to bring up another old-school offense, the Wing-T is back as part of the Auburn version of the spread. For that matter, Miles’ beloved I-formation smash-mouth style is back in the Urban Meyer Ohio State spread offense.

These things never died but had to go dormant, then presented to a new generation of players in a language they can understand.

Similarly, coaches don’t have to be put to pasture once they let the game catch them. Orgeron 2.0 seems like a huge improvement over the version of him that was head coach at Ole Miss from 2005-07, going 10-25.

Following his firing there, he re-evaluated where he was, adjusted and when he had a chance to replace the fired Kiffin as USC’s interim coach in 2013, he went 6-2 and came close to landing the job full-time. Now, he has a chance to do the same at LSU.

For Orgeron, it was not about evolving the Xs and Os, but about evolving his coaching style.

Maybe somewhere next week, Miles will be watching Saban running the spread against a team coached by an Orgeron who isn’t the micromanaging guy he was at Ole Miss. Maybe Miles will be back next year, and like Orgeron, having learned from his mistake, and like Saban, having evolved his approach.

The Miles that just got fired let the game evolve past him. Maybe the next version of Miles can, like Kiffin and Orgeron, restore his reputation.