College Football | The numbers show Pac-10 at the head of the pack

In the Pac-10, it's a time for thrusting out chests and feeling good about itself. After two weekends, the league has acquitted itself to the tune of a 13-3 nonconference football record.

Last Saturday, in fact, every Pac-10 team playing was a winner. It would have been a unanimous verdict for the week if not for Oregon State's unseemly 34-3 licking at Cincinnati on Thursday.

It's the first Saturday since Sept. 19, 1998, that the league went unblemished when it was playing more than a couple of games.

"Too bad we didn't hold up our end of it," said Mike Riley, the OSU coach. "I think the conference is at its strongest in a long time."

How strong? That's a story still to be written, what with games like Ohio State at Washington on Saturday and USC at Nebraska that night. Pick off those two, and hold serve against more lightly regarded teams, and the Pac-10 would have an assertive response to the disparaging offseason comments of Louisisana State coach Les Miles.

Meanwhile, there's a longtime California fan in northern California who holds that the Pac-10 is only getting some due that's long-deserved. He prefers to go by his cyber-handle, RealBear65, so we'll humor him.

Using raw data from the Web site cfbdatawarehouse.com, he crunched numbers from 2000 to 2006, tracking how the six BCS conference teams and Notre Dame did in nonconference games against BCS-league opponents (on the basis of league alignment at the time of the game), including bowl games.

Notre Dame was the winner, going 41-30. But — surprise — the Pac-10 had the best record of the six BCS leagues, at 66-60, followed by the SEC's 68-65. The other four leagues had sub-.500 records.

True, it's only one small measure of competence, and not necessarily the ultimate test. A win against Duke gets you one point, just as a victory against Ohio State does. And it's questionable whether the statistic is any more relevant than performance in bowl games, where, for instance, the Pac-10 went 3-3 last season compared to the Big East's 5-0.

Still, consider it a little more kindling in the crackling debate that Miles stirred over the summer, when he said of USC, "They're going to play real knock-down, drag-outs with UCLA, Washington, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford — some real juggernauts — and end up in the title game."

RealBear65 broke down how the top and bottom halves of each conference — based on composite league won-lost records since 2000 — did against BCS opponents, and the Pac-10's upper half led everybody at 43-26. The Big 12 was next at 44-34, the SEC third at 45-36. Meanwhile, the Pac-10's bottom half was 23-34, trailing the ACC, Big Ten and SEC.

Some of the numbers are revealing. Michigan, for instance, has only a 6-11 record against BCS teams, one of the reasons coach Lloyd Carr is under fire. By comparison, Washington is 5-8, in a period that includes some of the darker moments in program history.

Arkansas, meanwhile, has a mere two victories (against six losses) against BCS teams outside the SEC. That is fuel for SEC detractors, who claim the league too infrequently risks its reputation outside the SEC. In 2007, SEC teams have played a BCS team only once on the road — Tennessee's loss at Cal — while Pac-10 teams have been on the road four times for such games, going 2-2.

USC would also argue that LSU's path to a national-title game is easier than the Trojans'. While USC must travel to Washington, Oregon, Cal and Arizona State in the Pac-10 — after venturing to Nebraska — this is LSU's remaining road schedule in the SEC: Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi.

The Pac-10's most prized nonleague win is Oregon's blowout of Michigan. Observed Arizona coach Mike Stoops, "The spread [offense] seems to really bother the Big Ten."

Dennis Erickson, the first-year coach at Arizona State, said the Pac-10's early strength has something to do with the standard established at USC.

"You re-examine what you have to do to compete against them on the field, what you've got to do in the recruiting process," Erickson says. "You need to compete against USC."

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com