1.The BCS decided Monday what we all knew it would. USC’s 2004 BCS championship has been “vacated.” Combine that with the exclusion of the Trojans from the 2003 BCS championship and that means that the most dominant program of the decade has not one national championship. I’m not complaining -- USC reaped what it sowed, at least where 2004 is concerned -- but it sure is unusual that a program that won that much has nothing but an AP title.
2.It’s worth noting that USC is officially out of the 2011 Pac-12 South race, too, since the Trojans are ineligible for the title for the second consecutive year. In a league in which the power has tilted very much to the North, the Trojans’ disappearance is not as monumental as it might have been in, say, 2008. Still, we are left to wonder about what will happen if/when Matt Barkley gets hot. The Pac-12 South will be decided among UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado. The pickings, in other words, are slim.
3.So I’m in a Lids on 42nd Street in Manhattan over the weekend, serving as the wallet for my teenage son, when I see Boise State hats. Granted, it was two rows of Boise State hats in a wall of somewhere between 100 and 200 different models of college hats. But we’re talking Boise State seizing a foothold in New York, which is not a college town. That’s as good a measure of the rise of the Broncos as any I can conjure.