The Living Room Times

…you lose some.

Ah, well, they were both great games — reminders of why I love college football so much — and my team won the more important one. With Ohio State out of the way, USC “just” needs to go undefeated in the Pac-10 and beat Notre Dame, and they’ll be back in the national title game. It’s no easy task, but at least the path is clear.

(Well, unless Texas and the SEC champ both finish undefeated. Then we’ll have a 2004-like situation, and the Trojans could potentially play the role of Auburn. But Oklahoma State’s utterly stunning loss to Houston today is huge, because along with Oklahoma’s loss to BYU last week, it leaves Texas as the only real threat from the Big 12 to go unbeaten and potentially be ahead of USC in the BCS pecking order. Now we just need the Longhorns to lose to Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, or, well, anybody else, really.)

Notre Dame, meanwhile, looked like a genuinely good team even in defeat today, and they can still run the table — aside from the ‘SC game, of course — and make a BCS bowl at 10-2. And then, here’s a thought, maybe they can win it. So, in sum, my hopes and dreams for the season: still alive.

Fight on Trojans! Beat the Huskies!
Go Irish! Beat Sparty!

P.S. Thinking about the polls… with losses by Okie State and Ohio State, we can expect BYU to be #10 in the coaches poll and #7 in the AP poll come Monday. The Okie State loss is huge for them, too, since they have no hope of finishing ahead of an undefeated Big 12 champ, so the fewer unbeatens left standing in the Big 12, the better.

The Ohio State loss is also big, for BYU and for everyone else in the country who wants to avoid the specter of a Big Ten team in the title game again, because now the Buckeyes just need to beat Penn State, and the Big Ten will become an irrelevancy (unless everybody else has two losses, like in 2007, and the Mountain West contenders all have a loss). The Big Ten Cupcake Menace will be defeated.

Bottom line, I’d say the BCS pecking order is now:

1. Undefeated SEC champ
2. Undefeated Texas
3. Undefeated USC
4 (tie). Undefeated Pac-10 champ not named USC / undefeated Big 12 champ not named Texas
5. Undefeated Penn State
6 (tie). Any other undefeated BCS conference champ / undefeated BYU or Utah / one-loss SEC champ / one-loss Big 12 champ / one-loss USC
7 (tie). One-loss Big Ten champ / one-loss Pac-10 champ not named USC / one-loss Notre Dame

After that, we get into the murky world of two-loss SEC or Big 12 champs, one-loss ACC or Big East champs, one-loss Mountain West champs, and undefeated Boise States (and Houstons??). There just get to be too many scenarios to intelligibly consider them.

UPDATE: Upon further consideration, I think maybe I’m being unfair to Ohio State by placing them, if they win out, in category #7 (under “one-loss Big Ten champ”). If the Buckeyes run the table, they probably belong in category #6 — though my perhaps overly optimistic instinct is that, in the end, undefeated BYU would beat out one-loss tOSU, barely, in the BCS.