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Somewhere in the halls of the Pac-10 offices, someone is considering making a call to USC athletic director Pat Haden.
“You feel like playing in a bowl game this season?”
The Trojans are back in the Associated Press poll, coming off an impressive upset at reeling but ranked Arizona, and have a schedule that sets up for a five-game winning streak by year’s end. That would put coach Lane Kiffin’s team at 10-3 and third in the conference, not bad considering everything that’s happened since taking the job in January.
But there will be no postseason play for USC. And for the Pac-10, with a series of quirks and bad breaks, that could leave the conference with just three bowl-eligible teams and filling just one of its five non-BCS bowl slots.
Here’s the scenario: Oregon plays Boise State or TCU in the BCS title game, allowing the Rose to bypass a non-automatic qualifier and maintain Pac-10/Big Ten tradition by selecting Stanford. Arizona ends up in the Alamo and the rest of the conference cannibalizes itself.
It’s actually not that far fetched and certainly seems more likely than the muddled middle clearing.
Oregon State needs two wins against the top three teams in the Pac-10 – home games against USC and Oregon sandwiched around a trip to Stanford – after losing to UCLA at the buzzer, then getting walloped by Washington State, the Cougs’ first Pac-10 triumph since the 2008 Apple Cup.
Cal sits at 5-5. The Golden Bears’ finale is against Washington, which must win out, starting Thursday night against UCLA. The Bruins need two more victories, as does Arizona State along with a waiver to count both of its wins against FCS opponents. Those two play on November 26.
Basically, unless the Ducks, Cardinal and Trojans slip up, there’s going to be a whole bunch of teams that don’t hit the six win threshold.
Call me crazy, but that’s just fine if Oregon and Stanford get the big BCS stage, not to mention the big paycheck that goes with it.
The Pac-10 is killed by its bowl predicament. It has just one prominent January bowl game and no, moving the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl to the ninth does not count. It has no games against the SEC, but three against the ACC, WAC and Mountain West. It has a reputation for traveling poorly, which cost it the Cotton Bowl in the 1990’s and keeps it from getting into a Florida-based bowl.
So why not just cut the deadweight? Besides, getting the four-letter promotional machine to talk about Chip Kelly and LaMichael James and Jim Harbaugh and Andrew Luck for a month would do far more than running that glossy Pac-10 ad during the Sun Bowl.
Getting Oregon and Stanford regarded on the same level that USC held during the Pete Carroll-era is the single-most important thing commissioner Larry Scott can do for the prestige and television contracts of the conference.
Do I need to list the big-stage failures by the Pac-10 in recent years? The really brief refresher course begins with Texas Tech in the Holiday Bowl and ends with Ohio State in the Rose.
The high-flying Ducks have flash and style in droves thanks to backing from Phil Knight of Nike. The Cardinal is the epitome of physical football, even as it features the best quarterback in the nation.
Seeing those two, who may be the two best teams in college
football, raising the crystal ball or pummeling the Big Ten
champion on New Year’s Day is the only way the Pac-10 will
ever get the respect it should get.
Doing so with USC not on the sidelines would even better.
It would certainly do more than a bunch of 6-6 or 7-5 teams
beating other 6-6 or 7-5 teams.
