FanHouse Rose Bowl

When in doubt, play defense. That seems to be the philosophy right now at USC, which has taken an offense with nine returning starters and the nation's best offensive line and driven it into a ditch for large stretches of this season. And so it was on the road Saturday, the USC Trojans steadily outplaying the Cal Bears on the way to a 30-3 victory.

Mirroring last week's performance against Washington State, USC came out firing offensively in building a 20-0 second-quarter lead, eventually cooled, and still cruised to victory behind yet another dominating defensive performance. Strange days considering that defense was one of the best of this era last year and graduated the bulk of its talent to the NFL.

The attrition beat goes on at Troy where USC has lost projected starting cornerback Shareece Wright to academic ineligibility. We'll outline USC's growing injury woes in a moment but Wright's is intriguing because he had starting experience on an otherwise young defense that lost tons of players to the NFL.

Wright was expected to be part of a loaded secondary which has been dominant all camp for USC. Instead, the Trojans will shift sixth year cornerback-safety Josh Pinkard to cornerback and move longtime backup safety Will Harris to a starting gig. Harris replaced an injured Kevin Ellison for five starts last year and the USC defense remained superb as Harris shined particularly against Penn State in the Rose Bowl with an interception and fumble recovery.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

There's an unnerving, repetitive theme to the first four items in this week's FanHouse Walk -- lawyers. Maybe its just the offseason or an odd week, but they seem to be everywhere related to college football right now. Today's headliner finds Florida's Attorney General Bill McCollum threatening the NCAA and its president Myles Brand with a $1,000 fine or even jail time if it doesn't make public documents related to its confidential investigation into Florida State athletics.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Rap, Rap, Rapping At The Door -- Bad news is best delivered on Friday, so no surprise when it was discovered that in the new BCS contract the Rose Bowl must fill one of its slots to a non-BCS team (think Boise State or Utah) if it loses either the Big 10 or Pac-10 champion to the BCS championship game.

There are the Rose Bowl haters out there snarking away on this, but I think its another sad day for college football. Everyone bemoans the USC/Illinois type matchups in Pasadena, but I still find it fresh and what the Rose Bowl is all about. The various Miami/Nebraka, Texas/Michigan, USC/Texas type matchups were all enjoyable, but something has never felt right about them.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Mr. BCS Goes To Washington -- Except I have a feeling Jimmy Stewart would find some way to rail against the BCS, however wrongheadedly. You see, the big word in the halls of Congress on Friday was "fair" but don't let that confuse you. While the Mountain West and certain members of Congress are using the fairness term to stoke public support, their real concern is about money.

After an extensive search the Pac-10 has named WTA CEO Larry Scott its new commissioner. The 44-year-old Scott will take over on July 1 when current commissioner Tom Hansen steps down. He is credited with transforming the WTA thanks to an $88 million contract with Sony Ericsson and several lucrative television agreements. It doesn't hurt there's a Harvard degree to go along with his name and resume.

The Pac-10 arrived at Scott after it was revealed they were in pursuit of Sandy Alderson, current CEO of the San Diego Padres. This, after having been rebuffed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Greg Shaheen, the NCAA's Senior Vice President of basketball and business strategies.

The crystal football is here through at least January of 2015. Its not exactly the most shocking news around, but certainly a burr in the side of college football playoff advocates as the Rose, Orange, Fiesta and Sugar bowls will remain with the BCS through 2014. This effectively shelves any possibility for a playoff until the 2014-2015 college football season at the earliest.

The agreement provides for at least one more BCS Championship Game at each of the four venues once the old agreement runs out after the 2009-10 season. This news, paired with the crossover from Fox Sports' woeful BCS coverage to ESPN/ABC after next season should perk up the BCS after a rough few years.

Joe McKnight will miss spring football for the second time in as many years, but this time at least its not his fault. USC is holding its mercury-like tailback out of spring ball as he recovers from the painful-sounding dislocation of four toes on his left foot suffered early in the Rose Bowl.

He's a veteran who should be ready for fall and spring ball is a bit of a joke for established players like himself anyway, but its an odd second absence. Last spring, USC simply had no choice but to hold McKnight out of spring practices after he became academically ineligible. McKnight had dropped a class necessary to stay up and up, leading to one of Pete Carroll's classic "teachable moments".

1-5, with one game to go. One chance left to raise the conference's winning percentage to a mighty .285. And that chance rests on the less-than-broad shoulders of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Expecting the Buckeyes to show up in a big nonconference game is like expecting a bridge made out of meringue to hold up underneath a couple SUVs. It's just not something a sensible person would ever do.

It's not like anybody expected more of the Big Ten in this year's bowl games. Most folk expected the conference would be lucky to win one game and not only were they right, they were right about which game that would be. Iowa's 31-10 slashing of South Carolina is about the only thing the conference can be proud of.

Yes, Penn State had a good second half against USC. Wahoo! They almost came back against college football's laziest elite program! There's something to hang your hat on. Look at the rest of the games, if you dare. You can be a little proud of Northwestern for giving Missouri more fight than anyone expected, but there's a big fat load of Florida State 42, Wisconsin 13 festering out back, waiting for you. Crimony.

Welcome back, USC's national title hopes. Enjoy the pretzels. Try the dip. But don't get too comfortable.

Yes, as the Trojans paraded Penn State's corpse from end to end of the Rose Bowl Thursday night, Pete Carroll's team again entered the national title picture. Not in the BCS system, which will award its title to either Oklahoma or Florida even if the Sooners let Charles Barkley drive the bus to the game and the Gators put Matt Millen in charge of their personnel.

But AP voters are free to vote for any team and with the kind of no apologies beating the Beijing police for might be proud of, Troy roared yet again.

So exactly how many votes should USC's Rose Bowl victory account for?

Think the same number of votes Brett Favre will get for teammate of the year, the number of suits in Al Davis' wardrobe that don't require the adjective "jogging" or the same number of pairs of underwear women have ever hurled at Randy Johnson.

Think zero.

Or something close to it as we probably shouldn't rule anything out yet.

Maybe Florida and Oklahoma will play a game so horribly ugly in the BCS title tilt that if they made a movie of it, it'd have to start Kirsten Dunst and Amy Winehouse with a special guest appearance by Danny DeVito. And maybe Texas will pull a Buckeye of its own against Ohio State. But let's just say if the BCS title game plays out remotely within the realm of expectations, what the Trojans did against Penn State doesn't qualify as a national championship performance.

You beat a Big Ten team in a virtual home game in a BCS bowl. It isn't exactly curing the common cold and, statistically speaking, beating a Big Ten team in a BCS bowl game is exactly as likely as eventually catching a cold.

This is to take nothing away from the men of Troy. The Trojans had an excellent season, were champions of a solid league, became the first back-to-back-to-back Rose Bowl champions (and that there is Tom Emanski rarified air). They had a defense that could stand between John Daly and a Hooters or Pacman Jones and the opportunity to make a fool of himself, and were downright biblical in the way they went about business.

Heck, Joe Paterno called them them one of the best defensive teams he's ever seen and Paterno would know. It says here the man once recruited Moses to play middle linebacker.

But that's the beauty of college football. Its title is awarded for a season accomplishment, not the team that played best in the last game that was nationally televised.