The Pac-10 Should Cut Ties with the Rose Bowl

Once again, USC proved that the Rose Bowl is an annual mismatch.

Pundits said that this year was going to different. Penn State wasn’t like the other Big Ten teams the Trojans had easily defeated the past two years. The Nittany Lions were quicker and more potent on offense, and they would give Pete Carroll’s team a run for its money.

Instead, quarterback Mark Sanchez led a monstrous first half for USC, who led 31-7 after 30 minutes and never really looked back en route to a comfortable 38-24 victory.

In his postgame interview, USC coach Pete Carroll said, “I don’t think anyone can beat the Trojans.”

So why not give them the chance to?

No, I’m not talking about a playoff—at least not right now. A playoff would in all likelihood be great for college football, but the odds of one taking place in the next few years are slim to none.

I’m talking about fixing the real biggest problem with the BCS right now: the Rose Bowl.

As part of its storied tradition, the Rose Bowl is designed to annually feature the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions in a classic matchup to determine conference supremacy. There’s only one problem: The Big Ten representative has not won the Rose Bowl since 2000.

Over the past seasons, the Rose Bowl has welcomed a Big Ten representative six times. Those representatives are 0-6, with the last Big Ten victory coming when Wisconsin beat Stanford in the 2000 contest.

But that’s only the beginning of the story. The six Big Ten representatives have been outscored by a combined 85 points (that’s an average of 14 points per game), and only one of the six teams failed to lose by double digits—Michigan, in 2005.

The immediate story is even worse. During the past three Rose Bowls, USC has outscored its Big Ten counterparts 119-59. That’s an average of 20 points per game.

The Big Ten isn’t just losing. It isn’t even competitive.

In College Football Community Leader Lisa Horne’s recent article, “Dear World Wide Leader in Sports: Thanks for Nothing,” she discusses what she perceives as a mainstream media bias against the Pac-10 and its effect on the class of the conference, USC. More generally, she discusses the problem of making generalizations about teams based on conferences.

But in college football, each team plays at least two-thirds of its regular season games against conference opponents. Throw in the fact that most teams play at least two or three “cupcakes” in non-conference competition, and suddenly there are very few interconference matchups by which to judge teams.

What college football does give us is bowl games, and over the past three seasons the bowl games have shown that the Big Ten is clearly inferior. Combine the drubbings in the past two national championship games with the three Rose Bowl losses, and Big Ten representatives have five double-digit losses in their past five BCS bowl appearances.

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