How USC is the only Pac-10 team worth a damn.
So I pitched this article right before kickoff of the USC vs. Oregon St. game last Thursday, and I was going to write about how far ahead of the rest of the Pac-10 USC was, but Oregon State’s 27-21 victory seemingly disproved my thesis. I write "seemingly" because if my thesis could be overturned by a single upset, it wouldn’t be my thesis — it would be Skip Bayless’ thesis. Seeing as how its my thesis, let me tell you first how this changes nothing, and secondly I’ll tell you the thesis that I have been talking about without spelling it out.
There are three kinds of upsets in college football. There is the inexplicable blow out, where an underdog crushes an unsuspecting favorite by a large margin. This usually indicates a failure in the pollsters and oddsmakers to correctly calculate the relative strengths of the teams.
There is the hard fought game where score answers score until a final score and perhaps a goal-line stand seal victory for the underdog; this tends to mean that the underdog is much closer in strength to the favorite than supposed and they had a few lucky breaks that pushed them over the top. This is how we saw the Florida-Ole Miss game work out this weekend, the Rebels were down 10 at the half and battled back to a 1 point lead that they held by denying fourth and 1 run by Tim Tebow.
The final type is the surprise and hold upset type. This is the type where an underdog jumps out to a big lead on the unsuspecting favorite and then after the favorite shakes off their stiffness the dog holds out just long enough to win a victory on the merit of their play in the first half. I would call this the classic upset because this is the most common type we see and also the most commonly failed type, since sometimes there is just too much time in a game for that underdog to stave off the onslaught of the favorite. This kind also denotes the biggest talent gap between favorite and underdog, since an underdog that is closer in talent to a favorite will increase their lead, once they have it, fight back against the onslaught. If adding another five minutes onto the game would undoubtedly turn your upset into a loss then you’re just not that good a team comparably.
We already have been given some evidence that Oregon State was not that good of a team: a blowout at the hands of Penn State 45-14 and a loss to lowly Stanford in the season opener. The advantage they got was a juiced-up home crowd and an overconfident opponent, who had bought into their No. 1 ranking. Before USC knew it, the quarter was over and they were down 21-0. They battled back but finished just a touchdown short to a team that could score only 6 points in the second half. USC had woken up to put Oregon State in their place, but they ran out of time.
This brings me to my original point, the one I pitched just moments before kickoff in that game. The Pac-10 is an incredibly weak conference with the exception of USC, and it’s not like this year is an exception. If any year is an exception it’s last year when Arizona State and Oregon came together to almost dethrone the Trojans, but Marcus Dixon got injured and that was that, USC back on top. This is not a statement simply about this year, this statement refers to every year since 2003. USC has won the conference every season since 2003, the year of their split “championship.” That year the Trojans lost to Cal, which is the last conference loss they would have until losses in 2006 to non-entities Oregon State and UCLA. Losses to bottom-dweller Stanford and contender Oregon seemed to herald the end of the dynasty, but the aforementioned injury left USC on top, so outside of the loss to Oregon last season, USC hasn’t lost to a Pac-10 team that was even a remote contender for the conference title since 2003.
This phenomenon is actually more common than you might think. Outside of the SEC, this type of thing tends to cycle through conferences. Oklahoma has won 5 out of the last 7 Big 12 championships. The difference is in the gap. Texas is perennially challenging Oklahoma and the resurgence of Missouri and Kansas has made the Big 12 one of the top two conferences this year. The Pac-10 on the other hand is pitiful after USC. Comparing conferences is often an Internet controversy magnet, so before launching into a heavily subjective argument, let me hit you with some stats.
The Pac-10 is 13-13 in non-conference games. Their record against BCS opponents is 5-6, but without USC’s two wins that is down to a pitiful 3-6, including blow out losses like Washington to Oklahoma (55-14), Washington State to Baylor (45-17), and Oregon State’s aforementioned 45-14 loss to Penn State. They barely have a winning record against non-BCS teams at 8-7, which includes BYU’s 59-0 dismantling of UCLA, so much for easy competition.
This is important because some of the computer polls factoring into the BCS count Conference strength as a specific part of their calculations, and this strength for the Pac-10 is skewed by USC. With USC the Pac-10 is better than the ACC, Big East, and even the Big 10, still falling short of the SEC and Big 12, but without USC the rest of the teams fall into the gutter of the BCS conferences (and probably below the Mountain West as well). A similar removal, like Penn State from the Big 10 or South Florida from the Big East would drop them down one spot, but not three spots like USC’s absence, while the SEC and Big 12 only have a vaguely defined leader, since they each have several top teams neck-and-neck, so the loss of their best team wouldn’t have much effect on their overall conference standing.
It’s not about being best top-to-bottom; every conference has bad teams in it. This is about being strong at the top and in the middle, the places where bowl teams come from, since it’s the bowl games that determine to the best extent the strength of conferences. Speaking of which, the non-USC Pac-10 has also come up woefully short in bowl games. The second best Pac-10 team goes to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego to meet the third best team from the Big 12 — this of course disregards teams taken as at-large BCS teams. In the last seven Holiday Bowls the Big 12 has beaten the Pac-10 four times, and in four of those seven years the Big XII sent an at-large team to the BCS, which means the 2nd best Pac-10 team got the 4th best Big XII team instead of the 3rd. I can’t go through all the bowl history, but let this be a warning to you that the shining example of USC is just a thin veneer over a decaying conference.
Andrew Rist ’09 (arist@fas) will expect the emails of Pac-10 fans, if they can still read.