ShareThisA quick three and out as we mark the days until the Alabama-Florida SEC Championship Game showdown:
-- Now that Southern Cal's reign of dominance over the Pac-10 (7 straight conference titles) is as over as Lou Dobbs at CNN, might the Trojans be wary of a Seminole Curse? You remember Florida State, don't you? The Seminoles were the last team to dominate a BCS league with such relentless vigor, winning nine consecutive ACC titles from 1992-2000, part of FSU's amazing run of 14 consecutive top-four finishes in the A.P. poll.
But since that 13-2 loss to Oklahoma in 2001 Orange Bowl national title game, Florida State is 74-44, which may not sound bad until you consider that's 31 more losses than the Seminoles suffered in the 1990s. If you went back to 2001 and predicted even half that many losses this decade for FSU, you'd have been mocked worse than Michael Moore at tea party rally.
Perhaps USC's fall, which includes losses to Oregon and Stanford in the last three weeks by a combined 102-41, is as simple as having 21 players drafted by the NFL in the last two years. But maybe Pete Carroll had a better explanation when asked last week prior to the Stanford debacle about the Pac-10 as a whole.
"There's no room for error," Carroll said. "The margins have really narrowed."
Bobby Bowden knows the feeling.
-- An awful off-the-field year for the SEC took a sublime twist last Thursday night with the arrest of three Tennessee freshmen players on armed robbery charges. If you're comparing this crime on terms of sheer stupidity, Nu'keese Richardson, Mike Edwards and Janzen Jackson are college football's new holy trinity of fools.
We won't bore you with the alleged caper's laughably absurd details (holding up a couple of guys at a large, well-lit convenience store near campus complete with video camera surveillance at 2 in the morning, using a pellet gun, while one was using the restroom, fleeing in a pansy, sky blue Prius complete with a driver holding a bag of marijuana and a grinder). Perhaps the three should consider changing their majors to special ineptitude.
Richardson, a receiver who was the centerpiece of the Lane Kiffin-Urban Meyer spat last spring, and Edwards, a defensive back from Cleveland coached in high school by the father of former Ohio State star-Miami Dolphins receiver Ted Ginn Jr., were dismissed from the team Monday. Jackson, not coincidentally the most talented of the three who was suspended just a week before for undisclosed reasons, remains in limbo and is barred from team activities as Kiffin continues to "gather more information.''
The day before the trio was arrested, Kiffin had lauded his players' off-the-field behavior on the weekly SEC coaches' teleconference.
So at last we've learned exactly what can shut up the Vols controversial boy-wonder coach -- tempting the fickle winds of fate.
-- Back in the days of the Southwest Conference, Texas and TCU were rivals. The third-ranked Longhorns and No. 4 Horned Frogs hooked up 81 times from 1897 to the SWC's breakup in 1995. They've played just once since -- a 34-13 Texas win in Austin two years ago.
But could these two actually hook up for the national title Jan. 7 in Pasadena, Calif.? It isn't as far-fetched as you might think.
If No. 2 Alabama lost at Auburn Saturday, but then rebounded to beat Florida in the SEC title game in less-than-picturesque fashion, the Frogs and 'Horns, if they are unbeaten, might be perfectly set up. Of course, Boise State and Cincinnati fans would be howling if their teams are unbeaten as well. But the Bearcats seem to have a problem with voters (fifth in both the USA Today coaches and Harris Interactive Polls) while the computers once again are dissing the Broncos for playing in the sickly WAC (an average computer ranking of 7th).
Remember that the top two teams in the BCS rankings have changed in the final two weeks of the season in each of the past three years. Stay tuned.
UPSET PICK: North Carolina moved us to 7-4, so we simply need one more victory to clinch that elusive first winning season. Nothing would be better than clinching with our favorite wannabe pirate, Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, whose Red Raiders will knock off 6-point favorite Oklahoma Saturday in Lubbock.
REPLAY ON REPLAY: Congrats to the Big East on joining the Big Ten and SEC in flat-out ridiculous reversals in key games -- each one favoring the home team, which, oh by the way, was rated higher in the BCS standings.
Unfortunately, the replay reversal of a fumble into a touchdown for Cincinnati's Isaiah Pead in the Bearcats' 24-21 win over West Virginia Friday night goes beyond dumb. If anything, the replay confirmed the officials' call of fumble when Pead tried to stick the ball over the goal line, lost control and the Mountaineers recovered late in the second quarter.
But let's give credit to the NCAA. Thanks to this pathetic, broken system, it now has two sets of officials it needs to fix -- those on the field and the ones up in the replay booth.
(E-mail John Lindsay at lindsayj(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Column
