OPINION
By Bryan Burwell
NBCSports.com contributor
updated 4:08 a.m. ET Jan. 2, 2008
 | Bryan Burwell |
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PASADENA, Calif. - By the end of this flawless night, Pete Carroll knew how good this evening had been. Just before sundown, the Pasadena hills that rise above the southern edge of the Rose Bowl had turned radiant cardinal with the faint hint of gold. Southern California colors. And just after sunset, the scoreboard was glowing with the sort of overwhelming evidence — USC 49, Illinois 17 — which reaffirmed to the rest of college football what Carroll already knew.
The USC Trojans are scary good.
No. 6 Southern California, now 11-2, doesn’t have a chance of convincing enough pollsters that it deserves at least a small share of a divided national championship despite this dominant victory in the 94th Rose Bowl on Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean that at this very moment the Trojans couldn't be the best college football team in the land. Major college football is run by an idiotic system that has no real interest in determining which team is honestly the best, so we’ll never know how this healthy team would stack up against the so-called best — the Bowl Championship Series dance partners LSU and Ohio State.
“The last thing I want to do is sit up here and try to lobby,” said Carroll as he sat a few feet away from a glimmering Rose Bowl trophy. “But we did everything we could with what we had … The rest is up for discussion. But would we like to be playing right now? You bet we would. We would love to be playing football and we go anywhere, anytime and see what we could do… I don’t want this to be misconstrued. We had a great Rose Bowl championship win tonight. Let the argument go on there with the people battling the BCS process. I have no answer for them, I just wish we could keep playing and I know these guys would. We would play long into the springtime if we had to, if they would let us.”
But of course they won’t.
Carroll and the Trojans justifiably will not get many first-place votes in the final Associated Press writer’s poll because of those losses to Stanford and Oregon. But injuries left the best team in college football at less than full strength for much of this season. While it did not prevent the Trojans from stringing together a sixth consecutive 11-win season and a sixth Pac-10 title in a row, what it did do was eliminate Southern California from any meaningful national championship discussion.
But after the frightening sight of a Trojan team back at full strength on New Year’s Day, does anyone really believe this USC team couldn’t put on one hell of a show against any of the best teams in this crazy 2007 season?
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That’s what’s so much better about a playoff system like the one we see in college hoops. Teams have the opportunity to overcome midseason injuries. Teams have the opportunity to yell at the right time in order to make strong late-season runs. A loss at the start of the season does not eliminate you from title conversations.
No. 6 USC 49, No. 13 Illinois 17 |
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But here we a few days before the BCS “championship” game, and there are no less than three other teams — USC, Sugar Bowl winner Georgia and Big 12 champion Oklahoma — who are on top of their games when it matters most. If you had a real football playoff and the field included those three white-hot squads and No. 1 Ohio State and No. 2 LSU, who knows which team would come out on top.
“If we could play one more game, man that would be sweet,” said USC linebacker Thomas Williams as he stood in the midst of the Trojans' spirited post-game celebration. “It would be absolutely awesome if we could play one more week, one more game. But it’s a fact of life in college football that we can’t do that.”
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