How Quickly It Goes From Sweet to Sour

This season has not, overnight, been turned on its collective ear hole.

Six days is more like it.

Can anyone remember a more topsy-turvy week?

Last week: College football looked forward to pairing two teams for this year’s national-title game in the Jan. 4 Sugar Bowl.

This week: Three teams are vying for two national titles as college football veers closer to its sister sport of boxing, with all this talk of split championships and charges of chicanery. Like Shane Mosley calling out Oscar De La Hoya, USC Coach Pete Carroll has issued a challenge to play the Sugar Bowl winner to open next season. Any minute we expect Don King to be named bowl championship series commissioner and claim the pay-per-view promotional rights for USC versus the Louisiana State-Oklahoma winner.

BCS Justice: Once and for All.

Last week: Oklahoma was considered an invincible football machine and being compared with some of the great teams in college football history -- Notre Dame in 1947, Oklahoma in the 1950s, USC in 1972, Nebraska in 1995, Miami in 2001.

This week: Anyone think Division III power Mount Union could give Oklahoma a game?

Last week: Kansas State had not won a conference title since 1934.

This week: Kansas State has not won a conference title since last Saturday.

Last week: Oklahoma quarterback Jason White was the hands-down winner of the Heisman Trophy.

This week: White may now hand it down. His role in Oklahoma’s 35-7 loss to Kansas State probably drops him into the mix of, ahem, other top candidates who failed to lead their teams to conference titles, joining:

* Pittsburgh receiver Larry Fitzgerald. He caught three passes in a loss to Miami that cost the Panthers the Big East championship.

* Mississippi quarterback Eli Manning: He tripped over his feet on a fourth-down play in a 17-14 loss that clinched the SEC West Division title ... for LSU.

Some of us are old enough to remember when Heisman Trophies were won on Hail Mary passes thrown into a Miami mist.

Last week: Most people felt the BCS was a controversial and flawed system that needed to be reformed.

This week: Most people feel the BCS is a controversial and flawed system that needs to be buried next to nuclear waste. In a USA Today Web site poll, only 2% of respondents thought the current BCS system should be kept.

“I guess when the public yells and screams, it matters,” BCS coordinator Michael Tranghese said.

Last week: An NFL-style playoff for college football was not remotely being considered.

This week: Roy Kramer for USC chancellor is not remotely being considered.

Last week: The American Football Coaches Assn. was an organization with a mission statement to “maintain the highest possible standards in football and the coaching profession.”

This week: Thirty-seven coaches who cast first-place votes for No. 1 USC are being asked by the AFCA to turn over those votes to the Sugar Bowl winner, even if USC defeats Michigan in the Rose Bowl by the score of 50-0.

Brief history: The AFCA agreed in 1998 to award its trophy to the BCS title-game winner, having to know there was a chance the No. 1 school in the coaches’ poll might be the No. 3 team in the complicated BCS standings.

Why the coaches agreed to such a compact we’ll never know. OK, we think we know. We’ll take a flying leap here and guess that television, which pays most of the BCS bills, didn’t want to wait for a vote count to crown the BCS national champion, live, on national television.

We’re guessing television wanted to guarantee a “This Moment in Time” postgame sing-along, set to a backdrop of violins.

We’re guessing this is going to be a big problem in a couple of weeks if the team the coaches think is No. 1 won the Rose Bowl instead of the Sugar.

Last week: The Sugar Bowl was looking forward to playing host to this year’s BCS title game.

This week: The Sugar Bowl has to take its lumps as the Rose Bowl steals a week’s worth of pregame publicity.

Last week: The BCS computer operators were as popular as influenza.

This week: The BCS computer operators are as popular as foot fungus. Not much deviation here, although the computer geeks are quick to say now it is not their fault their numbers look screwy.

Geek cop-out: We were ordered by the BCS to remove margin of victory from our formulas.

The human polls, powered by eyeballs instead of data chips, could reasonably assess Oklahoma’s lopsided loss to Kansas State might warrant a drop from No. 1 to No. 3.

In the BCS computer world of reality bytes, though, that Sooner defeat was only one loss ... it might as well have been a triple overtime, gut-punch. That’s why Oklahoma held onto its No. 1 computer ranking and USC is home for New Year’s.

“What I look for is what they ask me to look for,” BCS computer man Peter Wolfe said this week. “And margin of victory is not used.”

Last week: The Rose Bowl was ruing the day it got talked into joining this BCS mess. In 1998, for the “good of the sport,” the venerable bowl loosened its traditional Pacific 10/Big Ten conference ties to join an alliance that promised to match the top two teams in a “national title game.” That game could not be made many times because the Pac-10 and Big Ten champions were bound to the Rose Bowl.

For signing on the BCS dotted line, the Rose Bowl received the 2001 national title game, a lopsided pairing of Miami versus Nebraska (coming off a 62-36 loss to Colorado).

In 2002, it was handed Washington State versus Oklahoma when it wanted Washington State vs. Iowa. If you recall that cat fight, the Orange Bowl exercised its economic selection option and claimed Iowa for its own, pitting USC versus Iowa in what would have been a terrific Rose Bowl.

This turned Pasadena faces redder than their roses.

Last week, the Rose Bowl found itself sizing up a possible Georgia-Michigan game as it heard pleas from 74-year-old Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden, begging for a chance to play in the Rose Bowl to complete his bowl game “grand slam.”

The Rose Bowl wasn’t convinced Florida State could fill its stadium, even if Bowden brought all his grandchildren.

This week: Rose Bowl staffers are doing leg kicks higher than the Radio City Rockettes. Not only did No. 1 USC vs. No. 4 Michigan land in their laps, the game essentially becomes a national-title game for USC, which could win the Associated Press crown with a victory.

Last week: Tom Hansen was the pragmatic, level-headed commissioner of the Pac-10 and a proponent of the BCS system used to determine the national champion.

This week: After No. 1 USC was nosed out of the title game by the margin of 0.16, Hansen screamed, “I don’t see how we can live with these rankings!”

He excoriated the computer man, Jeff Sagarin, who had Miami of Ohio ranked ahead of USC -- Hansen: “that’s so absurd” -- and vowed to lead the stampede for reform.

Hansen now says the computer geeks need to take a hike, exhorting, “There are too many instances of completely illogical results.”

Last week: The Orange Bowl thought it was going to be able to match Miami versus Ohio State in a rematch of last year’s thrilling Fiesta Bowl.

This week: What goes around comes around. When shove came to push in the BCS selection process, the Fiesta and Orange bowls both took Ohio State.

The Orange Bowl thought it would prevail because Ohio State in the Fiesta would have left the Orange with a rematch of Miami and Florida State.

The BCS commissioners disdain rematches and tried to talk the Fiesta out of Ohio State.

Guess what? Remember that BCS clause the Orange Bowl used last year to steal Iowa from the Rose Bowl?

Well, the Fiesta pulled out its get-out-of-jail-free card and used it to match Ohio State against Kansas State.

“The Fiesta argument was Kansas State was the Big 12 champion,” Tranghese said. “It felt Kansas State should have the opportunity to play the highest ranked team possible, which was Ohio State. It was a difficult call.”

Miami and Florida State players could hardly stifle their yawns.

“It’s something that no one probably wanted,” Miami offensive tackle Eric Winston told the Miami Herald.

After all, Miami already defeated Florida State this year, 22-14, and the teams will face each other in the 2004 season opener.

And you know Bobby Bowden is thinking: Don’t let it come down to a field goal.

Last week: ESPN analyst Lee Corso was considered college football’s resident “clown.”

This week: Corso has plenty of company.