How a topsy-turvy Pac-12 football season led to a late USC-UCLA game time

Tired of late-night Saturday games involving your favorite Pac-12 Conference football team?

USC had been spared the date-spoiling, dead-to-the-East Coast 7:30 p.m. time slot before this week, but UCLA had been a regular.

Local fans who yearned for a daytime or early evening time slot for the USC-UCLA rivalry game this year — television’s top choice for this weekend is being played at 12:30 p.m. — are disappointed today, and they can blame Colorado and Washington State.

Who knew those teams would be so good, and enough of an entertainment draw, that the Fox network — Channel 11 in the Los Angeles area — would choose that Saturday matchup for its afternoon game and push the Trojans and Bruins to late night on ESPN?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In a preseason poll, Colorado was picked to finish last in the Pac-12 South; Washington State, fourth in the North.

Yet, with two weeks remaining in the season, Colorado is in first place in the South, ranked 10th in the College Football Playoff, and has won eight games for the first time since 2004. If the Buffaloes (8-2 overall, 6-1 in Pac-12 play) defeat Washington State and Utah, they will win their first division title since joining the Pac-12 in 2011.

Washington State, No. 22 in the CFP ranking, is 7-0 in conference play for the first time in program history, a surprise turnaround after season-opening losses to Eastern Washington and Boise State. A victory over Colorado, coupled with a Washington loss to Arizona State on Saturday, would clinch WSU’s first appearance in the conference title game. And even if they lost to Colorado, the Cougars would still clinch the North with a win over Washington on Nov. 25 at Pullman.

Meanwhile, in a Pac-12 season turned upside down, some of the conference’s traditional powers are in tenuous situations — or already locked out of the race entirely.

Washington is the only Pac-12 team that has been nationally ranked every week. The Huskies climbed as high as No. 4 in the second CFP ranking — which, at the end of the year, would have given them a playoff spot — until they were upset by USC last week. Now they are No. 6.

Stanford, USC and UCLA — all ranked in national media and coaches polls during the preseason — were toppled in the season’s first few weeks. USC and Stanford have found their way back. The Trojans have won six in a row after a 1-3 start, moving to No. 13 in the CFP ranking. Stanford, also 7-3, has won three straight and is No. 24.

“We’ve kind of beat up on each other in the Pac-12, and we got off to a rough start,” said USC Coach Clay Helton, one of eight conference coaches who made a quarterback change during the season because of performance or injury. “If you don’t bring your ‘A’ game, you are going to get beat and that’s just a fact of the matter in this league. So we beat up on each other and you fall out of the top 25.”

USC’s win didn’t push Washington from the top 10, or out of Pac-12 title contention, but it did damage the Huskies’ national playoff hopes. They can’t afford another regular-season slip, and they would probably need an impressive win in the conference championship game and some teams ahead of them to lose in order to climb back into playoff position.

Stanford, which opened the season No. 8 in the Associated Press media poll, fell from those rankings in Week 6 after losses to Washington and Washington State and hasn’t been back, though the Cardinal — with running back Christian McCaffrey back in the lineup and producing — did crack the CFP top 25 this week.

“I’m not really sure why people don’t give the Pac-12, in general, the respect we deserve given the overall strength of the conference combined with the nine-game conference schedule,” UCLA Coach Jim Mora said.

Hmmm. Could it be that a large part of the country is out socializing, or getting ready for sleep, when some of the Pac-12 games are being played?

lindsey.thiry@latimes.com

Follow Lindsey Thiry on Facebook and Twitter @LindseyThiry