BCS | Pac-10 used to being on outside looking in

Happy birthday, Tom Hansen. For the party commemorating your 70th, we're hanging a piñata in a eucalyptus tree at Pac-10 headquarters in Walnut Creek, Calif., with the logo affixed. The rest of the college-football world is invited to take a healthy whack at it.

Hansen, the Pac-10 commissioner, flipped another decade on the odometer Friday. Sunday, he discovered life to be a lot like it was in his 60s. Even in a season when the Pac-10 is recognized nationally as worthy of trotting with the vaunted Southeastern Conference, the Pac-10 is a forlorn waif turning palms up on Bowl Championship Series selection day.

This was the rundown: Louisiana State (11-2) leaped from No. 7 in the BCS standings to second. In the title game Jan. 7 in New Orleans, it will play Ohio State (11-1), and the hope is, the Buckeyes don't hurl on the queen's carpet as they did last year against Florida on the same stage.

In the Orange Bowl, Virginia Tech (11-2) gets Kansas (11-1). The Sugar has Georgia (10-2) against Hawaii (12-0). The Fiesta features Oklahoma (11-2) against West Virginia (10-2). And the Rose is USC (10-2) against Illinois (9-3).

Maybe it's because the season has been such a Disneyland ride of twists, turns, ghouls cackling and waterfalls in your face, but this doesn't strike me as a boffo bowl lineup.

Virginia Tech-Kansas? The Jayhawks reignited the debate of sitting out a conference title game and benefiting, while Missouri went bust.

Georgia has to play straight man against Hawaii's edginess. Much as it was for Oklahoma last year against Boise State, there's more to lose for the Bulldogs than there is to gain.

Oklahoma-West Virginia is the best of the four, but so much for TV ratings.

And while there's a lot of chest-beating in Pasadena about the preservation of the traditional Big Ten-Pac-10 arrangement, does anybody believe USC won't: A. be a double-digit favorite, and B. make pulp of Juice Williams, the darting Illini quarterback?

Pac-10 followers will notice a familiar look: There's USC in the BCS, and nobody else for the fifth consecutive year. Like good sense and Lindsay Lohan, the Pac-10 and the BCS don't seem to go together.

League-wide, there was considerable hope that Arizona State, 10-2 and right there in Tempe, would be too tempting for the Fiesta.

Instead, the Fiesta was forced to take West Virginia after Illinois and Kansas were given at-large spots. It's not that Arizona State was a clearly better team than West Virginia (though the Mountaineers, losers to 28-point underdog Pittsburgh at home, weren't due a lot of breaks).

It's just that the Pac-10 has found so many ways to get jilted, it's laughable. In the 10 seasons of the BCS format, the Big Ten has had double entries seven times. The Pac-10? Twice.

Name a way to come in second, and the Pac-10 has done it. In 2001, Oregon (10-1) lost out for the title game to a Nebraska team that allowed 62 points to Colorado and didn't play in the Big 12 championship.

In 2004, a 10-1 California team got nipped by Mack Brown's campaigning for Texas. The next year, Oregon was 10-1 and sat out for, what, having garish uniforms?

On a national teleconference, I asked Mike Slive, the SEC commissioner and BCS coordinator, what he'd say to the Pac-10.

"There is a selection process and the bowls select the teams they want to have," Slive said. "I think the Pac-10 has been very comfortable with the current format."

Said USC coach Pete Carroll, "I don't feel so much for the whole conference. But I feel for Dennis [Arizona State's Dennis Erickson] and his guys."

Of course, ASU's shortfall is the Pac-10's. Every team slipped back a notch in the bowl lineup. Nobody felt it more than Oregon State, a nice team that went 8-4, won six of its last seven and skidded to the Emerald Bowl.

The bean counters in every Pac-10 athletic department have a frown on their faces today because a second BCS game was going to be worth about $400,000 to each school.

But, hey, they're used to disappointment.

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

Information in this article, originally published Dec. 3, 2007, was clarified Dec. 3, 2007. An assessment of Arizona State's omission from the BCS postseason lineup misstated the Fiesta Bowl's involvement in the decision. The inclusion of Illinois and Kansas as at-large teams rather than Arizona State forced the Fiesta to take West Virginia, which is an automatic qualifier as champion of the Big East Conference.