Hot Boudin, Cold Cous-Cous...

Sifting Through the BCS Week 2: Freakin' USC:

        
      1. Ohio State        0.9764
      2. Michigan          0.9451
      3. USC               0.9439
      4. West Virginia     0.7551
      5. Auburn            0.7466
      6. Florida           0.7261
      7. Texas             0.7241
      8. Louisville        0.7215
      9. Notre Dame        0.6730
      10. California       0.6680
      11. Tennessee        0.6497  

New iteration of Bowl Championship Series standings out, and again, nothing really noteworthy or exciting at all. That's why I expect my blog traffic to be unusually low today.

Michigan has overtaken USC, but this is just slightly bothersome to the Trojans after learning what their future string of opponents are capable of. Quoting Brad Edwards:

"Prior to Saturday, most analysts believed USC was bound to lose at least once in its season-ending stretch against Oregon, Cal, Notre Dame and UCLA. But after Oregon was beaten handily at Washington State, and Cal needed OT for a home win against shorthanded Washington, and Notre Dame squeaked out a victory over a UCLA team that seemed to find a way to lose, it's fair to say that stretch of games doesn't look quite as daunting for the Trojans. And we'll soon see how much the open date helped USC improve."

Awesome. I swear, possibly hearing that USC is playing in their 'fourth straight national championship game' would just add salt to the current wounds of this 2006 season.

In the case of USC losing, the 'perfect storm' that Brad talks about every season could be a'brewing again. Read: the gap between West Virginia at 4 and Tennessee at 11 is a mere 0.1054, which is relatively small compared to the 0.1888 between USC at 3 and the Mountaineers at the four spot. This just reemphasizes the bottleneck of (mostly) one-loss teams after the big three, who, unlike last season, will not be killing each other off anytime soon.

In fact, if we consider only one conference's contribution to the BCS picture, let's just take the SEC for H2F's sake, we can obtain a scary result. Given: 4 teams in the top 13 of the rankings: Auburn (5), Florida (6), Tennessee (11), Arkansas (13). I just threw up in my mouth.

Let's assume Auburn wins out, finishing 11-1, and Arkansas loses only one conference game, Tennessee. Florida runs the table at 11-1, earning the SEC East crown and a space in the conference championship, where they face West champion Arkansas, who beats out Auburn with the tiebreaker. Florida wins the conference. Also, let's just say Rutgers paces West Virginia, who had earlier won in Louisville. Let's also add California running the table, including a critical win at USC, for shits and giggles.

We'll also assume the winner of Ohio State/Michigan holds the number one ranking, from which the only advantage is choice of uniform color in the Taco. We would then have Auburn (11-1), who had earlier beaten Florida (12-1), who had earlier beaten Tennessee (11-1), who had earlier beaten California (11-1), as the likely next four teams.

There's also Texas just moving along as the highest-ranked one-loss team in the human polls. Texas is likely to finish the regular season and conference championship at 12-1, as well. However, Texas will fail to have a win nearly as quality as Florida, Tennessee, or Auburn. Which is good, because that would pretty much mean those Chance Mock teams in 2003 could probably pace a title when spliced into the 2006 season.

I've got a splitting headache, mostly from actually learning how to discretize functions and implement numerical schemes way more complicated than the BCS. Yeah, this is just leisure for me.

- P.T.