College football mailbag: USC’s search, Stanford’s chances and remembering Pearl Harbor

Each week during the college football season, national analyst Chris Dufresne will burn a timeout to answer questions and exchange opinions. You can email him at chris.dufresne@latimes.com and reach him at @DufresneLATimes on Twitter.

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My perfect scenario would be to have [Clay] Helton get the job and for USC to bring in an innovative and well-respected defensive coordinator. Hope it works out this way.

Ken Ehrilich

Is this Halloween weekend or Groundhog Day?

Two years ago around this time, USC headed north to Berkeley to play a midday game at California with an interim coach trying to make an impression.

In 2013 that coach was Ed Orgeron, who took over for the fired Lane Kiffin. Orgeron lost at Notre Dame and UCLA but otherwise made a strong case as to why he deserved the permanent position.

This year the coach is Helton, who took over for the fired Steve Sarkisian, lost at Notre Dame and started making his case last week with an inspired win over No. 3 Utah.

Helton seems capable enough to me, and deserves a hard, strong look, although some people at USC might want a clean break from the Sarkisian staff.

I think Helton probably has to be near perfect to earn a shot at the job. He certainly needs to beat UCLA.

Orgeron quit before USC’s bowl game in 2013 and Athletic Director Pat Haden handed the team over to another interim coach — Helton.

Man, this is like deja vu-SC.

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Let’s say Oregon beats Stanford and that is Stanford’s only loss. Then Stanford, with one league loss, goes to the Pac-12 title game and wins. You think they still go to the playoff?

Michael Jelline

Your scenario presumes Stanford has put a second loss on Notre Dame — the teams play Nov. 28 in Palo Alto — which probably knocks the Irish out. I do think there could be a two-loss team in the playoff this season, but if Stanford is that team it would need some help.

Two-loss Stanford is not going to dislodge an undefeated champion of the Big 12 — Baylor, Texas Christian or Oklahoma State — or the undefeated champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which could only be Clemson.

However, Stanford could unseat a one-loss champion of those leagues, especially if it’s Baylor in the Big 12. Stanford’s strength of schedule would trump Baylor’s on every level. The Cardinal played Northwestern and Notre Dame; Baylor opted for Southern Methodist, Lamar and Rice. Stanford would also have played an additional game, the Pac-12 championship.

The Big 12 does not play a title game and this is one reason it got left out last year in favor of Ohio State, which made an emphatic statement in the Big Ten Conference championship with a 59-0 win over Wisconsin.

Here’s another thing to note in advance of Tuesday’s first release of the College Football Playoff ranking: The committee had a far greater opinion of the Pac-12 than did the Associated Press media or USA Today coaches’ polls. All five Pac-12 teams were ranked higher last season in the first ranking by the committee than they were in the coaches’ poll that week.

The committee had Oregon at No. 5, followed by Arizona (12), Arizona State (14), Utah (17) and UCLA (22). The coaches had Oregon at No. 6, followed by Arizona State (14), Arizona (15), Utah (18) and UCLA (25).

The Pac 12’s average committee ranking was 14, compared with 15.6 for the coaches’ poll. The committee’s average was also better than the AP’s Pac-12 average of 15.4.

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Oregon winning, theoretically, was good for us Stanford fans?

David Lee

Yes, for a couple reasons: Oregon’s 61-55, triple-overtime victory over Arizona State on Thursday (and Friday morning) showed what Oregon would have been like had quarterback Vernon Adams Jr. not broken his finger earlier in the season.

Adams was spectacular in the victory and the playoff committee will take that into account if Stanford beats Oregon in Palo Alto on Nov. 14.

Oregon has improved to 5-3. One of the losses was by three points at Michigan State, another was double overtime to Washington State.

The second bonus of Oregon winning Thursday was that Stanford can’t be hurt by playing a weakened Arizona State, because the schools don’t play this season.

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Help me out here: I just finished looking at the AP poll. Memphis is undefeated and beat Mississippi, which beat Alabama. So why is one-loss Alabama ranked nine spots higher than Memphis?

Iowa is undefeated and beat Northwestern by 30, which beat Stanford by 10. Yet one-loss Stanford is ranked higher than Iowa.

Are the pollsters messed up or am I missing something?

Joseph Gutierrez

This isn’t 2005 anymore. The polls don’t matter! They are just there to amuse us until the selection committee convenes next week in Dallas.

If we still used polls and computers, Florida State and Alabama would have played for the national title last season instead of Ohio State and Oregon. Had college football operated like soccer’s World Cup, Florida State versus Alabama would have been the third-place game.

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I enjoy your college football coverage in the Los Angeles Times. However, in your story on the troubled Miami Hurricanes football team, you garbled former Hurricanes player Jerome Brown’s statement in his tirade against Penn State many years ago.

Any card-carrying Jim Healy alumnus — and there are loads of us still around after 21 years — knows that Brown said on the Healy sound bite: “Did the Japanese go and sit down and have dinner with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them?”

Joe Cohen

I, too, was a card-carrying Healy fan. When I was I was covering the Rams in the 1980s, I waited nervously each night for Healy’s broadcast to hear whether he might comment on something I wrote, messed up, missed or garbled.

I braced myself whenever Healy started any segment with “Attention, Journalist Bill,” which was his nickname for Times sports editor Bill Dwyre. Healy would follow with his clip of Willie Nelson singing “Georgia,” his foreboding ode to Rams owner Georgia Frontiere.

That’s when I really started to sweat. Healy would breathlessly continue with something like …. “Is it true, Journalist Bill, that your Rams beat reporter was having a foot massage while an important player transaction was going down … ?”

So, of course, I heard Brown’s famous Penn State quip dozens of times over the years. Frankly, I’m still not sure, exactly, what Brown said. I’ve seen several different references. One L.A. Times story from 1988 reported it as, “Did the Japanese sit down with Pearl Harbor before they bombed her?”

Some have suggested that Brown thought Pearl Harbor was a real woman and that’s why he ended his quip with “her.”

When Brown died in a car accident in 1992, Healy announced on the air he would never play the clip again.

I miss Jim Healy. I miss Jerome Brown. I’ll miss “Journalist Bill,” who just announced he will be retiring from The Times next month.

Healy, if still alive, would have broken the story two days ago on drive-time radio with “Is … It … True?”

Just don’t ask Tommy Lasorda what he thought of Dwyre’s performance.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com