USC, Pac-10 No. 1? No and No

Welcome back, USC's national title hopes. Enjoy the pretzels. Try the dip. But don't get too comfortable.

Yes, as the Trojans paraded Penn State's corpse from end to end of the Rose Bowl Thursday night, Pete Carroll's team again entered the national title picture. Not in the BCS system, which will award its title to either Oklahoma or Florida even if the Sooners let Charles Barkley drive the bus to the game and the Gators put Matt Millen in charge of their personnel.

But AP voters are free to vote for any team and with the kind of no apologies beating the Beijing police for might be proud of, Troy roared yet again.

So exactly how many votes should USC's Rose Bowl victory account for?

Think the same number of votes Brett Favre will get for teammate of the year, the number of suits in Al Davis' wardrobe that don't require the adjective "jogging" or the same number of pairs of underwear women have ever hurled at Randy Johnson.

Think zero.

Or something close to it as we probably shouldn't rule anything out yet.

Maybe Florida and Oklahoma will play a game so horribly ugly in the BCS title tilt that if they made a movie of it, it'd have to start Kirsten Dunst and Amy Winehouse with a special guest appearance by Danny DeVito. And maybe Texas will pull a Buckeye of its own against Ohio State. But let's just say if the BCS title game plays out remotely within the realm of expectations, what the Trojans did against Penn State doesn't qualify as a national championship performance.

You beat a Big Ten team in a virtual home game in a BCS bowl. It isn't exactly curing the common cold and, statistically speaking, beating a Big Ten team in a BCS bowl game is exactly as likely as eventually catching a cold.

This is to take nothing away from the men of Troy. The Trojans had an excellent season, were champions of a solid league, became the first back-to-back-to-back Rose Bowl champions (and that there is Tom Emanski rarified air). They had a defense that could stand between John Daly and a Hooters or Pacman Jones and the opportunity to make a fool of himself, and were downright biblical in the way they went about business.

Heck, Joe Paterno called them them one of the best defensive teams he's ever seen and Paterno would know. It says here the man once recruited Moses to play middle linebacker.

But that's the beauty of college football. Its title is awarded for a season accomplishment, not the team that played best in the last game that was nationally televised.
The argument for USC in its latest incarnation rests primarily on its dominant win over Penn State and the Pac-10's overall excellence in bowl season.

But the Pac-10 wasn't as good as its bowl record suggests and the Big Ten was even worse.

True, the Pac-10 finished the postseason 5-0, which makes for a nice round winning percentage, but is only 5-0 for a reason. The bottom of the league was bad. Actually, bad doesn't begin to describe the bottom of the Pac-10, but conveniently has exactly as many syllables as the league's bottom two teams had wins. With every team in the Pac-10 essentially spotted two conference wins to start the year, all a team had to do to become bowl eligible was win your three-game non-conference slate, beat two historically awful teams in that football black hole of Washington, knock off one of the league's weak links and see what kind of deal Expedia.com could get for you. But most of the league couldn't even manage that. Arizona State won three league games, but lost to a marginal 5-7 UNLV team at home to finish one game short of eligibility. Stanford lost to Notre Dame (Let that sink in for a moment) and was subsequently relegated to the Lingerie Bowl. UCLA lost to BYU 59-0, a team that won 10 but whose only notable victories were over Colorado State and Air Force.

By comparison, the much maligned ACC placed 10 of its 12 teams in bowls. Every BCS conference placed more teams than the Pac-10's five. Even the eight-team Big East earned six berths as did non-BCS league Conference-USA.

And the league's five wins don't tell us all that much about how impressive USC's conference wins were at the time.

Arizona's victory over BYU in the Las Vegas bowl was nice, but BYU was hardly a standard for excellence this season. Despite lofty preseason expectations, this busted BCS buster was manhandled by both TCU and Utah. Give all the credit to Mike Stoops' team, but that's hardly an endorsement for a No. 1 vote for USC.

Both Cal and Oregon earned notable wins, beating ACC also-ran Miami and Oklahoma State, but don't mistake these two teams for the two clubs that USC beat. When the Trojans' topped Cal 17-3, the Bears were rotating quarterbacks and preseason Heisman candidate Jahvid Best hadn't yet evolved into the dominant back he became over the season's final three games, when he rushed for 201, 311 and 186 yards. And Oregon, who ran into a big ball of angry, playing USC the week after the Trojans lost to Oregon State, suffered from a string of quarterback injuries that made oil rig repair or Pacman Jones' security detail seem like a safe career choice. Jeremiah Masoli, the third-string quarterback at season's start, was still fighting off Darron Thomas. The Ducks got healthy by year's end, hammered Oregon State and played exactly the kind of game expected of them in the preseason against Oklahoma State.

(Oregon State, the other Pac-10 bowl team, beat Pitt 3-0, making that midseason trade for Roberto Luongo really pay off, but the Beavers, of course, beat the Trojans.)

Would USC still beat these teams now? Probably. But when handing out the honor of the best team of the season, it's about who you beat and when you beat them, and who posted the best effort across 15 weeks of the regular season and a bowl game. It's not about who played best in their last game. Is there a little luck involved? Sure, but that's why in college football you need to be great, or close to it, every week.

And then there's the value of beating Penn State.

Maybe you watched some of the Big Ten this season. Maybe you didn't. After all, unlike waterboarding, even the Department of Justice agrees that watching Big Ten football is a form of torture.

The league's only quality win thus far is Penn State's victory over an Oregon State team that was fresh off a loss to Stanford. Ohio State imploded against USC. Michigan State lost to Cal and Georgia. We'd go over the failures of Wisconsin's season, but you could simply slam a few light bulbs into your forehead to simulate the experience.

It's a little unfair to write off Penn State as just another high-profile Big Ten flop, but the Trojans' win over Penn State won't be in the same league as a BCS title victory over Florida or Oklahoma State, or likely for that matter wins over Texas Tech and Alabama, even if those wins seem like events of the distant past.

There will almost certainly be a few idealogues that vote for USC or Texas, whose neutral-field win over Oklahoma would likely trump a win over the Nittany Lions as well, at season's end, voters who would prefer to beat around the BCS despite its acceptance by the teams that play the game. They're agenda driven voters and are like those who vote for Ralph Nader, refuse to cast a ballot for a first-time baseball Hall of Famer, and Tony Kornheinser while in the Monday Night Football booth – all people you should be allowed to punch in the face and receive a gift certificate to Chick-fil-A for your efforts.

So congratulations on a heck of a season, USC, congratulations on being the unquestioned No. 1 program in college football, and congratulations on the Rose Bowl. You earned every bit of that.

But you didn't earn a national title. Not for this. Even if it was recently nationally televised.