BCS Standings Shuffled

Miami won a school-record 30th consecutive game Saturday but suffered a rare loss Monday, the Hurricanes dropping to No. 3 in the third bowl championship series standings.

In the ongoing decimal-points battle for college football supremacy, Oklahoma retained top position with 2.04 points, and Ohio State jumped three spots from last week to claim the coveted No. 2 spot with 5.57 points.

Miami, the defending national champion, is .44 behind Ohio State with a 6.01 total, but the situation may only be temporary.

In other words, don’t call out the riot squad in Coral Gables just yet.

The rest of the BCS top-10 includes Texas at No. 4, followed by Washington State, Georgia, Notre Dame, Iowa, USC and Virginia Tech.

The schools with the two lowest point totals in the final standings Dec. 8 will play for the BCS national title in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 3.

Miami’s BCS slide was almost inevitable, given that the Hurricanes struggled Saturday to beat lowly Rutgers.

The only surprise was that Ohio State, not Notre Dame, took advantage of events.

Notre Dame trailed Miami by only .33 last week and looked a cinch to pass the Hurricanes with a win over Boston College.

The Irish lost, though, which allowed Ohio State to move in on Miami.

With his team having had to rally to win its last three games, Miami Coach Larry Coker says he has more to worry about than rankings.

“It will be easy to rate us if we don’t play better,” he said Monday.

Still, Miami can probably determine its own fate in the coming weeks.

The Hurricanes, if they beat Tennessee in Knoxville this week, will probably inch past Ohio State in next week’s BCS standings. And two of Miami’s final four opponents are ranked in this week’s top 25, Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech.

So if Miami wins out, it would seem to have BCS strength-of-schedule advantage over Ohio State, which plays unranked Purdue and Illinois before its showdown Nov. 23 against Michigan in Columbus.

To put this week’s standings in perspective, Miami lost half a point in the BCS just for falling to No. 2 in this week’s Associated Press poll. Yet, a win over Tennessee this week could push Miami back to No. 1 and that alone might make up the deficit to Ohio State.

Then again, some of this BCS stuff is unexplainable.

Miami, for instance, improved its computer ranking from 4.33 last week to 2.67 this week despite playing Rutgers, yet lost ground in the strength-of-schedule component, dropping from 1.36 to 1.84.

Ohio State, fifth last week in the BCS and 2.8 points out of second place, made huge gains, in large part because two of the teams ranked ahead of the Buckeyes, Notre Dame and Georgia, lost over the weekend.

Ohio State picked up two points in the poll-average component, and also improved its point total in the computer and strength-of-schedule components.

Notre Dame remains in the national title picture, although the school’s drop from No. 9 and No. 10 in the coaches’ and writers’ polls makes it more difficult. The Irish are seventh in the BCS, 9.76 points behind No. 2 Ohio State.

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(Tabular data not included here.)