At This Rate, Texas Would Be a Longshot

Penn State versus USC at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 4?

That’s the scenario that would have played out had the bowl championship series formula given equal weight to graduation rates along with the two polls and computer aggregate, according to the Miami Herald’s Jeff Shain.

Texas, with the fifth-worst graduation rate in Division I-A football, would not be anywhere near Pasadena.

The most recent figures compiled by the NCAA show that only 40% of Longhorn players arriving between 1995 and 1998 earned their degrees. At USC, the figure was 55%.

“The Nittany Lions’ 84% graduation rate would zoom them all the way to No. 1,” Shain said.

Trivia time: Where was the 1942 Rose Bowl game played?

Jet fuel: Newsday’s Ken Berger says the New York Jets “aren’t high” on USC quarterback Matt Leinart and might not take him in the NFL draft, “fearing that he could be a weak-armed, injury-prone clone of Chad Pennington.”

There is also the possibility, of course, that Leinart is equally “not high” on the 3-11 Jets.

Stuck on first: Noting how busy baseball’s other teams have been in the off-season, Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News is perturbed by the Texas Rangers’ lack of movement.

“Right now it’s a little like the wedding scene from ‘The Deer Hunter.’ It’s dragging on forever, it’s not what I want to see and there has to be some better stuff ahead, so let’s get on with it.”

Take a letter: One candidate for the most thankless job at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, will be the play-by-play announcer of Finland’s hockey games.

The Finnish roster, which already resembles the leftover letters in a Scrabble game, includes not one, not two, but three sets of brothers -- Saku and Mikko Koivu, Sami and Niko Kapanen and Tuomo and Jarkko Ruutu.

Try sorting that out on the air in the heat of the moment.

Times change: It’s Pat Riley, Shaquille O’Neal and the Miami Heat against the Lakers today, which the Sporting News finds a bit odd because in his 2001 autobiography, “Shaq Talks Back,” O’Neal wrote that having to train more than “two hard hours” a day was the reason he “would never play for” Riley.

Tasty morsel: When fisherman Clarence Olberding yanked a rainbow trout out of Holmes Lake in Nebraska a week or so ago, he noticed something funny, or perhaps finny, about the one-pound fish.

It had two mouths.

So what did Olberding, 57, do? Take it to the museum in Lincoln? Give it to an ichthyologist for study? Mount it?

“I’m going to smoke it and eat it,” Olberding told the Lincoln Journal Star.

Trivia answer: Duke Stadium in Durham, N.C. The Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena because of wartime restrictions on the West Coast after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

And finally: Baltimore Raven nickel back Deion Sanders said that on any given play he can be 28 again instead of 38. “I’m not as good as I once was,” he told the Associated Press, “but I’m good once as I’ve ever been.”