Surveying the Pac-10 landscape

We've passed the halfway mark in the season, and there are some important questions:

Who wins the Pac-10?

Does the Pac-10 finally get a second BCS bid?

First, the race for the Rose Bowl:

Right now, three teams have a reasonable chance of winning the Pac-10: USC, Oregon, and Arizona. Arizona is obviously the weakest of the three, but they control their own destiny and are playing excellent football, improving every week.

The Oregon-USC game will really clarify the Pac-10 race. If USC beats the Ducks, then they will win the Pac-10 if they win the rest of their games. But if Oregon beats the Trojans, then USC will have 2 conference losses and will be effectively eliminated from the title chase. With two conference losses, Oregon will have the tiebreak against USC and will have to lose three times for USC to win the conference, which is highly unlikely.

If Oregon wins, the conference race is actually rather simple. In that case, the conference championship will come down to the Nov. 21 game in Tucson, when the Ducks travel to play Arizona.

If USC beats Oregon, then it’s a lot more complicated. At that point, 3 teams all have one conference loss. The key game on the schedule becomes Arizona’s December 5 trip to USC. But any loss by Arizona or USC could throw that equilibrium into chaos.

Now regarding the chances that the Pac-10 will receive a second BCS bid. The Pac-10 hasn’t sent two teams to BCS games since 2002, when Pac-10 Champion Washington State lost to Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl and USC beat Iowa in the Orange Bowl.

10 BCS Bowl bids are a available, and only 6 have automatic tie-ins. Usually one mid-major team goes undefeated and receives an automatic bid. So that leaves 3 available bids from the six BCS conferences. One will almost certainly go to the loser of the Alabama-Florida SEC Championship game. So that leaves two other bids. The Big East and Big 12 are almost certainly not going to get two bids - Texas and Cincinnati are the only good teams in their respective conferences. That leaves the Big 10, the ACC, and the Pac-10 fighting for 2 extra bids. The Big 10’s most likely second team would be Penn State (presuming Iowa wins the title). The ACC’s most likely second team would be Miami (presuming Virginia Tech wins the title).

With so much football still to play, it’s difficult to fully ascertain how the schedule will play out, but the Pac-10 certainly has their best shot at getting a second bid in several years. The best chance the Pac-10 has is if USC and Oregon each do not lose a game outside of this week’s game at Autzen, so that the winner finishes with one loss and the loser finishes with two. In that case, it’s very unlikely that Miami or Penn State would be picked ahead of Oregon or USC.

Nonetheless, there’s an outside chance that a bowl on the East Coast would prefer to have Penn State or Miami than a Pac-10 team (who are generally regarded as not having fan bases willing to travel). If so, then the Pac-10 could have a serious gripe on their hands - they are statistically either the best or second best conference in the nation. And if they can’t get two bids this year, then there is a significant bias against West Coast teams built into the BCS.