Ohio State, South Florida sit atop first BCS standings
October 14th, 2007
Irving, TX (Sports Network) - The first BCS standings were released Sunday, showing the results of the shocking upsets that have defined the 2007 college football season. If the season ended following Saturday's play, the Ohio State Buckeyes would battle the South Florida Bulls for the national championship.
Ohio State (7-0) vaulted to the top of national title picture, with a .9416 BCS average, thanks to losses by previous unbeatens USC and LSU in the past two weeks. South Florida (6-0), which has scored early season upsets over Auburn and West Virginia, earned an average of .9200 to take the second slot.
The rest of the BCS top 10 is filled with surprising schools, including Boston College (7-0) third, South Carolina (6-1) sixth, Kentucky (6-1) seventh and Arizona State (7-0), which sits eighth.
LSU, which suffered a 43-37 three-overtime loss to Kentucky on Saturday, is in fourth place in the BCS and, considering the challenging SEC schedule remaining for the Tigers, can vault back into one of the top two spots with some help.
Oklahoma took down another surprising school, previously unbeaten Missouri, 41-31, and earned the fifth spot in the BCS standings.
USC, which only two weeks ago looked primed for another run at a national title, finds itself a disappointing 14th. The Trojans followed their embarrassing upset loss to Stanford with an unimpressive 20-13 win over Arizona.
Despite all of the upsets early in the season, there is not a school similar to last year's Boise State, a team from outside of the six big conferences threatening to earn one of the BCS bowl bids. The Western Athletic Conference's Hawaii (7-0), which struggled to a 42-35 overtime win over San Jose State on Friday, is the only school not from a BCS conference to crack the top-25.
The final BCS standings will be released on December 2.
The BCS title game will be played in New Orleans on January 7. The other top bowl games -- Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta -- will still play their traditional games on New Year's Day or soon after. The BCS title game rotates among the four traditional sites -- Pasadena, Miami, New Orleans and Arizona -- giving each of the venues two games in one particular season.
The champions from the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, Pac-10 and SEC make up six of the 10 teams in the five BCS games. The other four spots go to at-large teams that have at least nine wins and are ranked among the top 14 in the final BCS standings.
One team from among the champions of Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West Conference, the Sun Belt Conference or the Western Athletic Conference automatically qualify for a BCS game if either: such team is ranked in the top 12 of the final BCS standings, or, such team is ranked in the top 16 of the final BCS standings and its ranking in the final BCS standings is higher than that of a champion of a conference that has an annual automatic berth in one of the BCS bowls.
The BCS system uses a pair of human polls -- the Harris Interactive and the USA Today -- as well as six computer rankings. Each poll counts one-third toward the overall score, while the average of the computers completes the formula.