Oregon accepts its BCS bid with barely a quack

Give the Oregon Ducks time . . . they’re new at this?

When ESPN announced Oregon at No. 2 in the final Bowl Championship Series standings Sunday, a meeting room packed with Ducks erupted in . . . silence.

The only noise was someone’s baby crying.

There were otherwise no adult yelps, high-fives or duck quacks.

Who hit the mute button?

“It was no surprise,” senior defensive end Brandon Bair said afterward in the hallway of the Casanova Center. “You’d have seen great response if you would have seen us down at No. 4 or No. 5.”

Oregon players absorbed the biggest football news in school history with quiet confidence.

Coach Chip Kelly doesn’t generally get too excited about things. When asked where making the national-title game ranked in terms of accomplishments, he deadpanned, “It’s right up there.”

Kelly’s motto is “win the day,” and Oregon hasn’t won all the days yet.

“It hasn’t changed anything,” Bair said of Oregon’s attitude. “We never strived to be No. 1 in the polls, we never strived to be in the national-championship game. We strived to win every game. And we’re 12-0.”

There’s only one humongous game remaining.

Oregon wasn’t going to fake exuberance for the cameras — especially for a foregone conclusion.

Bowl Selection Sunday actually occurred Saturday, when all the pieces fell into place.

Auburn finished first in the final BCS standings and Oregon finished second. Auburn improved its BCS lead over Oregon from .0002 to .0146, as if it mattered.

Auburn and Oregon will play for the BCS title on Jan. 10 in Glendale, Ariz.

The order of the standings — Auburn, Oregon, Texas Christian, Stanford and Wisconsin — set up the other BCS bowl pairings.

Rose: TCU vs. Wisconsin. What happened to Stanford? The Rose Bowl was required this year to take the highest-ranked school from a non-automatic qualifier conference. TCU earned that right by finishing third. The Horned Frogs were the undefeated school left out of the title-game mix this year, but that can happen in a flawed system when you don’t have a playoff.

Undefeated Auburn finished third in 2004 — and didn’t take it very well.

TCU was, at least, rewarded with a jewel of a backup plan — a trip to the Rose Bowl. The Horned Frogs will face a Wisconsin team that finished the season by scorching opponent after opponent.

Wisconsin ended in a three-way tie atop the Big Ten with Ohio State and Michigan State, but won the tiebreaker by finishing higher than those teams in the final BCS standings (Ohio State was sixth, Michigan State ninth).

“Once again, the BCS has delivered,” BCS Executive Director Bill Hancock said Sunday.

Those opposed? Raise your hands.

Orange: Stanford vs. Virginia Tech. It would have made more geographic sense for Stanford to play in the Fiesta, but that’s not the way the selection process works. The Orange Bowl got to pick before the Fiesta and, understandably, wanted BCS No. 4 Stanford over four-loss Connecticut.

Some thought the Orange Bowl might have been put off by the belief that Stanford won’t get large numbers of fans to travel across the country, but Orange Bowl Chief Executive Eric Poms said his game was not about to pass on the best one-loss team available.

“We feel the fan base will be there,” he said.

This is actually a pretty good matchup given that Virginia Tech has won 11 straight games after losing its first two.

Fiesta: Connecticut vs. Oklahoma. The Fiesta gets “stuck” with UConn, the Big East champion, but the consolation is hosting this year’s BCS title game. This is not a great pairing for Oklahoma, which is expected to win and will be excoriated if it doesn’t. It’s sort of the same situation the Sooners faced four years ago when they played Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl.

Anyone remember how that one turned out?

Sugar: Ohio State vs. Arkansas. The Buckeyes’ tradition and fan base make them a popular at-large selection even though Boise State was just as deserving — if not more. But that was never going to happen. Arkansas, with its NFL-ready quarterback Ryan Mallett, is a fine Sugar replacement for Auburn.

The two biggest bowl losers, without doubt, were Boise State and Michigan State.

Boise State came within two plays of earning a shot at the national-title game. If Alabama had made one play against Auburn the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Boise State had made one kick against Nevada later that night, we’d be talking about the first mid-major to make the BCS title game.

Oh, well. Boise State dropped all the way to the Las Vegas Bowl, where it will face 10-2 Utah. The Broncos took one of the bowl slots the Pac-10 Conference couldn’t fill.

Michigan State lost a BCS bid to the Big Ten’s three-way tiebreaker rules. Wisconsin earned the Rose Bowl berth despite having lost to Michigan State. The problem was Ohio State, which lost to Wisconsin, did not play Michigan State, forcing the conference to use the BCS standings to determine the automatic bid.

Michigan State ends up in the Capitol One Bowl against Alabama, the defending national champion.

At least Michigan State got to a bowl game. Only two eligible teams were left out of the party — Temple (8-4) and Western Michigan (6-6).

Sorry about that.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com