Column:  Pat Haden in wrong place at wrong time at USC-Stanford game

A blue-ribbon committee convened early Sunday to choose the weekend’s low-light playoff team.

The 13-member panel was fictional, formulated in a columnist’s post-Oregon drive back to the hotel, but included so many upstanding citizens its credibility could not be impugned.

“They are an all-star team of people who love this game,” fictional committee spokesman Phil Peacock said.

The phantom panel included a former U.S. secretary of State, a Rhodes scholar and a former superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Members were puffed up and marketed like the Mercury astronauts, then paraded through the breakfast lounge at a residence-style hotel off Interstate 5 in Salem, Ore.

The committee then got down to work.

UCLA received consideration for being a preseason top-10 team that nearly lost at home to Memphis. The Bruins survived, 42-35, but were put on a “don’t watch list” until they start taking their preseason ranking seriously.

Stanford Coach David Shaw, in a three-point loss to USC, chose to punt from the Trojans’ 29- and 32-yard lines. Somewhere, former Michigan coach Lloyd Carr woke up from a nap and smiled.

Hawaii Coach Norm Chow had a caught-by-cameras tantrum against the officials at halftime of his team’s loss to Oregon State.

Colorado needed a furious rally to stave off a loss to Massachusetts, and Washington allowed 52 points to 1-AA Eastern Washington — and still won.

The panel ultimately whittled the list down to two finalists.

Second place was a tie for second between USC Coach Steve Sarkisian and Athletic Director Pat Haden.

Back to reality here. This is everything we imagined could go wrong when commissioners decided to allow acting athletic directors to be members of the new College Football Playoff selection committee.

The argument was that it works fine with the NCAA basketball tournament selection panel. But, of course, football is completely different.

The basketball committee is never going to leave out a team that can win the NCAA title. The argument in hoops is over team 68 and 69.

College football is a white-hot sport, where passions and loyalties run deep and one loss can knock you out of the national title picture.

Your team’s chance might come down to a referee’s call on Sept. 6, say, in Palo Alto.

If you were going to put an active athletic director on the committee, Haden seemed a reasonable choice.

It was proved Saturday, though, that even someone as levelheaded as Haden can get caught up in the heat-of-battle emotions.

No way in Helena should Haden have come to the field, at the request of someone on the sideline, to argue an unsportsmanlike penalty on Sarkisian (which was warranted).

It was behavior unbecoming an AD and a committee member but, ah, there lies the rub.

You can’t do either job justice. What if USC meets Stanford in the Pac-12 title game with a playoff berth on the line?

It doesn’t matter how fairly Haden thinks he can adjudicate both jobs, it’s all about perceptions.

Other active ADs on the committee include chairman Jeff Long (Arkansas), Barry Alvarez (Wisconsin), Oliver Luck (West Virginia) and Dan Radakovich (Clemson).

It’s a bad idea.

It was also ridiculous that two Pac-12 officials agreed to hear Haden’s case during the game. They should have told him to pretend he was a quarterback again and go take a hike.

The College Football Playoff will eventually have to address the reprimand likely to be handed down on Haden on Monday by the Pac-12 office.

Officials were not answering Sunday.

“We will not have any statement today,” CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock said.

Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott offered a text saying, “Once reviews are complete we will comment.”

Haden, of course, was wrong. It is a real stretch, as some suggested, that he should be removed from the panel.

The incident in Palo Alto reinforced, though, the common-sense idea that acting ADs can be conflicted because their first duty is to their employers.

The solution doesn’t need to be radical. This is a 12-year contract, and most committee members are serving three-year terms. Make sure future replacements don’t cash checks from universities that could make the playoff.

Haden’s weekend was surpassed only by the collective woes of the Big Ten.

Commissioner Jim Delany’s conference went down in a cacophony of collapse.

First the “good” news:

• Ameer Abdullah scored late to lead Nebraska to a 31-24 home win over McNeese State. And Iowa, whew, squeaked by Ball State, 17-13.

• Maryland and Rutgers, which joined the Big Ten about 10 minutes ago, are a combined 4-0.

• Penn State, socked by scandal and still bowl-banned by the NCAA, looks like the masthead leader after improving to 2-0 with victory over Akron.

The rest of the league was surrounded by police tape.

• Northwestern fell to 0-2 after losing at home to Northern Illinois. The school that voted on whether to unionize may soon form a Wildcat strike. And Central Michigan defeated Purdue, 38-17.

• The troika stunner was the big three — Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State — all losing on the same day for the first time since Sept. 17, 1988.

No. 7 Michigan State held its own into the third quarter in Eugene against Oregon, but wilted under the Ducks’ relentless pressure in a 46-27 loss.

It was a compliment when Oregon offensive coordinator Scott Frost said of the Spartans: “It took us awhile to break them.”

Ohio State is obviously not the same without quarterback Braxton Miller and proved it by losing at home to Virginia Tech.

Michigan ended its series against Notre Dame with an embarrassing 31-0 loss in South Bend. It was the Wolverines’ first shutout in 365 games dating to 1984. Michigan’s seemingly lost coach, Brady Hoke, provided only curt answers at his postmortem presser.

He’s going to need longer answers.

It was the Big Ten’s worst day since going 0-5 in New Year’s Day bowl games on Jan. 1, 2011.

Saturday could have a lingering drag because, with only four playoff spots available, at least one of the “Big Five” leagues is going to end like Michigan on Saturday.

It is going to get shut out.

The Big Ten faces a long, crawl back.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com