Column: Rankings belie USC’s steep fall from glory

Pete Carroll’s USC Trojans will stumble into their game against rival UCLA on Nov. 28 having lost two of their previous three games to Pac-10 opponents. The 55-21 slaughtering of USC by the Stanford Cardinal last weekend gave Carroll and the Trojans their third Pac-10 loss this season — the most since the coach’s first year with the program — and knocked them out of contention to play in “The Granddaddy of Them All,” the Rose Bowl.

The Trojans are currently a dismal fifth place in the Pac-10 standings, and yet they are still ranked 18th in the BCS standings. Even at 18th, the current Trojans are overrated and need to be taken for who they are now, not the program that they represent.

What I mean is, the Trojans are not a representation of the USC teams that have taken the field in the previous seven years under Carroll. The Trojans had two notable wins over Ohio State (ranked No. 8 in the USA Today coaches’ poll) on Sept. 12 and a convincing win over California on Oct. 3. Yet the Trojans barely beat Notre Dame, who recently lost to Navy, and they were only able to put up 14 points against a battered Arizona State defense a week prior to their loss to Stanford.

Freshman Matt Barkley has not followed the tradition of stellar USC quarterbacks. He put up only 11 touchdowns this season, with 10 interceptions, including three in the loss to Stanford. Also, the historically bruising Trojan defense lost its core from last season and allowed the most points in a game in history of the program on Saturday.

Stanford, on the other hand, is a very underrated and explosive team. Beating Oregon and USC in back-to-back weekends seems like an impossible feat for any team two weeks ago. Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh approached the tough schedule as if it were a playoff scenario.

“Each week is put-up-or-shut-up time,” the coach said. “The way you stay in the discussion is you stay alive. If you don’t, then you’re out. That’s kind of where we’re at.”

Harbaugh has turned the Stanford program around with the help of freshman quarterback Andrew Luck and star tailback Toby Gerhart, who rushed for 178 yards and three touchdowns against USC. Look for Stanford to finish the season strong with wins over California and Notre Dame.

The overarching issue, which has become apparent with respect to USC this season, is that the ranking system puts too much emphasis on preseason rankings and historical performance. The Trojans entered the season ranked fourth in the country, and following their first loss to Washington, the Trojans fell to 10th. At this point in the season, USC had one loss to an unranked opponent, and Miami was 2-0 with wins over ranked opponents Georgia Tech and Florida State, and yet it was only ranked 14th.

By Week 8, the Trojans had climbed their way back up in the polls, to fifth in the BCS rankings, ahead of undefeated Texas Christian University, Boise State and Cincinnati. The next weekend, USC was crushed by Oregon, but it only fell to 12th in the BCS standings, while Oregon rose only to eighth, behind three still-unbeatens that USC was ahead of the previous week.

Week 10 is when the BCS standings really began to baffle me. Oregon lost to Stanford by nine, while USC barely beat a poor Arizona State team, yet USC found itself in ninth, while Oregon was moved back to 13th.

Wait, if Oregon beat USC by 27 points, and both teams are two-loss teams with similar wins, why in the world is USC ranked four places higher than Oregon? The system is flawed. There is no way that USC should have been ranked higher than Oregon at that point in the season. USC had beaten then-No. 8 Ohio State and then-No. 20 California, but Oregon had beaten the same California team when it was No. 6, crushed USC and lost to undefeated Boise State.

The USC Trojans are Los Angeles’ professional football team. Southern Californians love USC, whether or not they know anything about the team, who is on it or who they are playing in a given week. USC has a huge following. Itís odd to think about a college football team as a “big market” team, with there being no money paid to the players, but USC is a big market program in the same way that the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys are big market teams in their respective leagues.

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USC’s national fame makes it more visible to the people who vote in all of the human voting polls. This is significant because coaches and Associated Press voters on the East Coast do not stay up to watch the West Coast games, and they only see whether USC lost or won, not how they played. Oregon is gaining some national attention, but nowhere near the amount that USC does. USC is always in the news, and the USC quarterback is a national icon, no matter how good he is. USC has many nationally televised games, and it always receives some highlights on “SportsCenter.” All of this attention results in being overrated in the rankings every single week.

I am happy to say that this year USC is not that good, is on the verge on having four Pac-10 losses and could be playing the Brut Sun Bowl.

Exactly where it deserves to be.

Correction

An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that USC's game against UCLA will be played this Saturday.