Sat, Jan 03, 2004 page20

• USC shadow looms large over college calculations

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  A gigantic cardinal-and-gold elephant has hunkered down in the musty laboratory of the Bowl Championship Series. The pachyderm has claimed squatter's rights and bragging rights, all kinds of rights, and is not going away any time soon.

  The University of Southern California did the worst thing possible for the intricate but rather imperfect formula for producing a national football champion. It walloped a very good Michigan team, 28-14, on Thursday in the Rose Bowl to cast a huge shadow, a veritable eclipse, on the festivities in New Orleans tomorrow.

  Allegedly, Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, the chosen two, are meeting for the national title tomorrow. But the pesky football writers, who vote in The Associated Press poll, had been picking USC as the best team in the land going into the bowl games, and nothing that happened on Thursday is likely to change their quirky and independent minds.

  

  USC head coach Pete Carroll gets doused by his team at the Rose Bowl.

  PHOTO: AP

  Playing in its home region, USC was more aggressive, more confident, more mobile. The crusher was a nifty 15-yard touchdown pass from Mike Williams, the slippery receiver, to Matt Leinart, the quarterback, late in the third quarter.

  With hipper-dipper stuff like that, the Trojans might have looked like champions, or at least co-champions, even to the Dr. Frankenstein computer that shunned USC from the Final Two in New Orleans.

  Perhaps USC looked so good because it had something to prove. The USC players knew that a victory in the Rose Bowl would almost surely give them an unofficial share of the national title for the 2003 season, forever, and they took what they could.

  Now the architects of the BCS are going to have to deal with it. They created a rigid system of picking two teams for one designated championship bowl each year. That is fine if there are two teams that are obviously superior to anybody else.

  Beat everybody and take your chances. It is the only way to go. As long as the Bowl Championship Series exists, which is for another two years, the only way to have a definite claim on the title is to go undefeated.

  But LSU, Oklahoma and USC all came into these bowl frolics with one loss apiece, which creates immense mischief. It is very difficult to go undefeated in these days of 12 regular season games, followed by conference championship games that do nothing but complicate things.

  Oklahoma won all 12 regular season games but then was slaughtered by Kansas State, 35-7, in the Big 12 Conference championship game on Dec. 6.

  This raises a rather obvious question: Why hold conference championship games if losing does not hurt a team's chances of being selected for the BCS game?

  This is not like the national basketball tournament, which encompasses 65 teams. Teams lose their conference championship games over the final weekend and shrug it off because they know they are going to the NCAA tournament anyway. Everybody knows the conference finals are bogus.

  The real action is the quarterfinals, where underachievers and overachievers scramble to get into the semifinals just to earn a place in the first round of the national betting brackets.

  The football situation, however, is totally different. The BCS is based on the premise that only two teams are worthy. Nevertheless, The AP continues to hold a vote after the bowls. The coaches who vote in the USA Today/ESPN poll have previously recognized, as they agreed to, the winner of the BCS game as the top team, but maybe this is the year the coaches show some spunk.

  The high motivation of USC raised the level of this classic meeting between two grand old conferences that used to meet here every Jan. 1 until the Rose Bowl officials joined the pot-luck roving supper of the BCS.

  The two old opponents met here in the surprisingly cozy sunken oval, in the shadow of purple mountains.

  Aside from a slight drizzle in 1997, there has not been significant rainfall at this game since 1955, a phenomenon that is blamed for the influx of millions of frozen immigrants from back East.

  Once again, the Rose Bowl had the feel of the center of the football universe. Michigan, which had lost twice, wanted to prove "we're back," in the words of coach Lloyd Carr. They did not exactly do that against USC, which lost only once, 34-31, to California in triple overtime on Sept. 27.

  The two teams in the Sugar Bowl have also lost once, Oklahoma most recently.

  "With the BCS, it doesn't matter when you lose, and that's a good thing," said coach Bob Stoops of Oklahoma.

  One of the two teams in New Orleans will lose again -- with the formidable silhouette of USC looming large over everybody's shoulders.
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