Who the
hell is Jacquizz Rodgers (he's the little fella pictured above)? I would venture to guess just about every college
football observer, Pete Carroll included, was asking themselves that very
question Friday morning after the 5-6 180 lb freshman Oregon St. running back
rushed for 194 yards and 2 touchdowns in the Beavers 27-21 upset over top
ranked USC.
I woke up
feeling just as embarrassed over Joe McKnight’s 16 rushing yards on 7 carries
as he was. USC losing, after two weeks of me proclaiming them the premier
college football program in the country, didn’t exactly help brighten my
college football knowledge credentials. Even with their history
of losing to lesser Pac 10 teams during the regular season- Cal ‘03 OSU and
UCLA ’06, Stanford ’07- I really didn’t see this coming.
I would
almost use the cliché that the loss was “beyond my wildest dreams,” but that is
the most ridiculous overused cliché in sports. It drove me nuts this past
Olympics to hear athletes say that winning a gold medal was beyond their
wildest dreams.
Really? You
train forty plus hours a week in a specialized sport and it never crossed your
mind that you could become the best in the world?
I was a sub
par Divison II swimmer and still had illusions of winning the Heisman Trophy in
football right up to the point my college eligibility ran out this past year.
Either Olympic caliber athletes are bold face lairs or the most unimaginative
people on the planet.
Anyway,
back to the Trojans. While people around the country are icing their ankles
after breaking them while jumping of the USC bandwagon, I’ve decided to buckle
my seat belt on said bandwagon. I’m not going to let one nightmarish Thursday
night in Corvallis make me do a 180 on opinions I’ve formed after years of
observation.
Sure, USC's
chances took an enormous hit by losing to an unranked Pac 10 team; but, despite
what people like Chuck Booms will lead you to believe, they're not done by any
stretch of the imagination. If there is one thing we should have learned from
last years college football season it’s that a good team is never dead.
Look back
to last year, Ohio St. dropped to #7 in the polls the second week of November
after losing to unranked Illinois, two weeks later LSU fell to #7 after losing
their second game of the season to unranked Arkansas. What do Ohio St.
and LSU have in common? Both played for the BCS title game last. If LSU
and OSU can lose games in the month of November and recover to make it into the
title game, its way to early to proclaim USC dead after a loss in September.
The Trojans picked up their loss early; as long as they take care of business
(no longer a given) and win the rest of their games they can rest assured that
the teams that are currently ranked ahead of them will fall.
Looking at
the top 25 we can divide the teams into 7 categories based on conference
affiliation: The Big 12, SEC, Big 10, Pac 10, ACC, Big East, and Mid-Major non
BCS conference schools. When you look at each of these categories separately it
takes only slightly more imagination than that of an Olympic gold medalist to
create a scenario with USC in the BCS title game.
Pac 10: USC is in the
Pac 10, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say USC is the Pac 10. The Trojans
will get a chance to play every team in the conference, and I’m going to make
the assumption that OSU will lose at least two games in the next two months.
So, as long as USC takes care of business (again, no longer a given), they’ll
win the conference.
Mid-Majors: After
watching Boise St. shock Oklahoma two years ago and Hawaii get shell-shocked by
Georgia last year there is a pretty wide margin for error when trying to
speculate how good a non-BCS conference school is. Right now BYU at #8 is
leading the charge as far as mid-majors in the top 25 goes. After watching the
Cougars struggle to beat a god awful Washington team I’m not convinced they
won’t lose a game, and even if they don’t I don’t think they get a crack at the
title because of how poor Hawaii represented mid-majors last year.
Big 10: After Ohio
St. was dismantled by USC out in California everyone figured we wouldn’t have
to worry about a crappy Big 10 team laying in an egg in the title game again.
Well, I’ll be darned if someone didn’t hear 200-year-old Joe Paterno scratching
at the inside of his casket and let him out to coach a few games. Penn St. is
5-0, ranked #6, and has looked dominating thus far. The Nittany Lions still
have to play at Wisconsin and at Ohio St., I don’t see them making it through
the regular season without at least one loss.
Plus, when
you look around at successful college coaches over the last few years- Pete
Carroll, Urban Meyer, Les Miles- you’ll notice that most of them are relatively
young high energy guys. College football is a game of aggression and emotions,
for a coach to recruit and motivate top notch athletes he needs to have some
measure of aggression and emotion. The days of the stoic college football coach
are, for now at least, over; charisma and energy are now just as valuable a X's
and O's. I've created a new rule of thumb: If you don't have the energy to jump
one inch of the ground you don't have the energy to coach a team to the BCS
title game.
Back to
Paterno, I'm not totally convinced he still has a pulse rate, it wouldn't
surprise me if he has been dead since the late '90s. For all I know Penn St.'s
medical school has made an elaborate marionette puppet out of his corpse to
create a facade a la Weekend at Bernie's. If there's legitimate question as to
whether JoPa is free standing or even alive, I highly doubt he could pass the
once inch vertical test...bad news Penn St...bad news.
The one
inch vertical could come back to bite me seeing as to the college football
team I like is coached by Charlie Weis. Charlie doesn't strike me as the type
of guy that wakes up 45 minutes early for plyometrics training. I'm going to
hold out hope that Weis's off season ACL/MCL surgery gives him superhuman
abilities similar to what Henry Rowengartner's Tommy John surgery did for him
in the movie Rookie of the Year (did he say funky butt-loving?).
Big East/ACC: I
combine these two conferences because, honestly, they aren’t good enough to
deserve a stand-alone paragraph. Right they have two teams a piece in the top
25 with #10 South Florida the lone unbeaten. Last year USF climbed as high as
#2 in the polls, and then proceeded to lose four games. I don’t see anyone
making the mistake of giving a school with a football program less than ten
years old too much credit again.
SEC: The “ESS EEE
SEE!!!” is more like a dysfunctional family than a major college football
conference, it’s just a different world down there. When SEC teams play out of
conference games the entire conference stands behind their southern brethren. SEC
schools have a lemon party love fest with each other (warning: If you don't know what lemon party is, do NOT google it
at work). Look no further than the 4th quarter of Alabama's creaming
of Clemson in week one when 'Bama fans let the rest of the country know the
conference they were from- “ESS EEE SEE!!!” You didn't hear the Midshipmen from
Navy chanting “In-de-pen-dents (clap clap),” when they beat Wake Forest
this past week, they just don't have the pride in affiliation the SEC does.
The
SEC family loves itself to a fault it, but also beats the living crap out of
itself during conference play; Florida falling to Ole Miss at home is a perfect
example. With the family's incestuous activities during the preseason and
domestic abuse during conference play, the SEC really does its best to put the
“South” in Southeastern Conference Football.
By the time
we get to the SEC championship game I don't see how a team can survive its
conference schedule with less than two losses. I think a one loss USC team will
get the opportunity to play in the BCS title game over a two loss SEC team.
Big 12: With six
teams in the top 25, four of them undefeated in the top 10 (Oklahoma, Mizzou,
Texas, and Texas Tech), the Big 12 have the best chance of putting a team in
the Championship. These teams will all have to face each other, and only one
team, my money is on Oklahoma, will win the Big 12 Championship. The precedent
was set last year with Georgia- a team that doesn’t win it conference doesn’t
get the invite to play for the BCS title.
Go ahead
and criticize me, but I am sticking by my preseason prediction- USC and
Oklahoma play for the BCS title. College football has been in action for a
little over a month, and already four teams that were in everybody's top 25
have fallen, you don't think a few more highly ranked teams won't fall in the
next two months?