I’m in the very early stages of tinkering with a possible new homepage design. Any thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

I neglected to link to Arash’s football column from this past Monday’s Daily Trojan, but it was quite good, as usual. A few highlights:

“God, I hate them,” Williams said. “I hate UCLA. That’s what this is about.”

It’s about USC turning what used to be one of the most storied rivalries in college football into one the biggest mismatches on its schedule.

This game has turned into more of an annual revelry for the Trojans than a rivalry. For a rivalry to be possible, both teams have to bring something to the table. In this collaboration, UCLA has become the Garfunkel to USC’s Simon, the Sonny to its Cher, the Marty Jannetty to its Shawn Michaels.

UCLA has become a dead weight that USC has to carry on its back for one week each year for publicity purposes only, with the Bruins receiving more attention than its second-rate program and players deserve. There hasn’t been this kind of hype surrounding an expected execution since the Middle Ages. …

The measure of USC’s dominance over UCLA in the last two years can be summed up in the Trojans’ greed when looking at the final scoreboard. It actually kills many USC fans that last year’s final score was 52-21, and not 52-7, and that this year’s final was 47-22 and not 47-9. [Ed.: That’s so true.] …

If it means anything to the Trojan faithful, UCLA fans take little solace in the fact that USC has outscored UCLA, 126-43, in the last three years under Pete Carroll and beaten them five straight times for the first time in school history.

“Hopefully we’ll be smacking them around long after I’m gone,” said Williams, who finished the game with 11 catches for 181 yards and two touchdowns � all in the first half. “I really don’t like them at all. Every chance we get, I don’t care if it’s hopscotch, I want to beat them.”

The Bruins probably wish there was a hopscotch game coming up so they could somehow redeem themselves, but judging from the Bruins’ performances this week in rivalry games, they probably would have lost that matchup as well. In addition to being demolished at the Coliseum by the second-ranked Trojans, UCLA was defeated by USC’s No. 1 women’s volleyball team, No. 1 men’s water polo team and No. 3 club ice hockey team. The Daily Trojan even did its part, humbling the Daily Bruin, 48-26, in a flag football game on the UCLA campus Friday afternoon.

If this kind of domination continues, the Bruins are in danger of developing an inferiority complex larger than Canada and deeper than Jan Brady’s.

Hehehe. Read the whole thing, as they say.

By the way, here’s the DT’s front-page story, its lead sports-section story, its game analysis, and its BCS analysis. Oh, and let’s not forget the post-game frat-party police story. Heh.

Also, here is a PDF file of the DT’s front page from Monday. Headline: “Victory is Sugar-sweet.”

The cat blog has come back to life! Butter, having gotten ahold of the blog password despite Toby’s best efforts, is finally introducing herself to the world… and she shows us a picture of herself drinking out of Capone’s fish bowl earlier tonight:

In other recent blog-child news, Becky has thoughts on Britney Spears and gay marriage (unrelated topics, alas), my dad is finally fulfilling his pledge to post about Ireland, and Jen is taking a trip down musical memory lane with REM and Bon Jovi.

Also, Tim Stevens may have a BrendanLoy.com blog of his own soon. Stay tuned for more news on that.

ESPN’s Brad Edwards, a.k.a. Mr. Road to the BCS, provided us mere mortals with some additional insight in an online chat yesterday. Among other things, he gave his take on the USC-LSU computer-poll battle:

LSU is already ahead of USC in both Massey and Anderson & Hester. In my estimation, they will also jump them in Sagarin, and I believe Billingsley and Colley are also distinct possibilities. If LSU is able to preserve its .4 quality-win bonus [if Georgia wins out but doesn’t go to the SEC title game], five computers is all it will take to get the Tigers over USC. If LSU loses that bonus, they will need at least 6 computers, if not 7. Right now, though, I don’t see a computer in which USC seems to be untouchable.

The number of computers needed could change, however, with upsets in the strength-of-schedule department.

Anyway, one questioner in the chat expressed this Trojan fan’s sentiments perfectly: “Every week we’re told, if so and so loses, USC will get the nod…and every week it is a new so and so! When will USC finally be in the drivers seat?” Yeah, dammit!!

Meanwhile, in a sentiment that won’t be popular with this blog’s crowd, SI’s Stewart Mandel notes the likelihood of a third consecutive non-traditional Rose Bowl matchup, and says the folks in Pasadena should get over it.

SpaceWeather.com suggests looking west tonight, right around sunset, to catch a lovely glimpse of Venus very near to the crescent Moon, which will be beautifully illuminated by Earthshine.

A fellow Tolkienista has created a Lord of the Rings advent calendar. It counts down, of course, not to Christmas, but to Dec. 17, the premiere day for Return of the King!

Some of the entries are serious, others are funny. I particularly like December 4.

Does USC have a better chance of winning the national championship if LSU reaches the Sugar Bowl?

Huh?

Think about it. For LSU, the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans would be a virtual home game. Having the crowd on their side might be just the boost a team needs to help them beat seemingly unbeatable Oklahoma. So perhaps the LSU homeboys would have a better chance of pulling the upset than the far-from-home Trojans would. In which case…

LSU wins a close one against Oklahoma. Meanwhile USC, with a friendly crowd of its own in Pasadena, dismantles Michigan. Destroys ‘em. Tears ‘em apart. Embarasses ‘em, 45-22 or some such score. So now, what do the Associated Press voters do? USC was their team all along, and the Trojans surely proved themselves. The Tigers deserve props too, for stopping the unstoppable Sooners, but they’ll get their #1 ranking from the coaches’ poll automatically… why not give the Trojans their due, and award them a split championship?

And voila, we would have the best of both worlds: a USC national championship, and a colossal embarassment for the BCS (whose raison d’etre is to prevent split championships).

I’m not saying I’m rooting for it, I’m just saying it’s something to consider.

UPDATE: In comments, Andrew says this scenario is extremely similar to his root-for-OSU scenario of last week, for which I chastised him severely at the time. Now he’s chastising me, saying I took his idea without giving him due credit. Moreover, if he’s right, presumably I’m not only a thief, but a hypocrite! (And I smell bad, too.)

Well, he’s got a point, to a point. He’s right that the two scenarios are similar. I happen to think there are major differences: one, I’m not actually rooting for my scenario, just throwing it out there, whereas Andrew explicitly said he was rooting for Ohio State in order to “eff the BCS”; and two, my scenario is offered up only on the premise that a USC championship might actually be more likely this way — it isn’t just an alternative, more complicated means to the same end.

But still, the two scenarios are similar, so Andrew’s right, he thought of it first… sort of. :)

Rich Tellshow has updated his projected final BCS standings to more realistically reflect computer-poll realities if LSU wins out, and the new projection shows the Trojans and the Tigers finishing in — I’m not kidding — a dead heat for second place, 7.11 to 7.11. (Recount! Recount! Hanging chads! Voter fraud! Pat Buchanan!)

Tellshow notes: “This is from 2002 but I think it is still valid: ‘In the event of a tie for the second spot in the final standings, the tie would be broken by (in order) head-to-head results; a win against the highest ranked team in the final BCS top 25 standings or by using the strength of schedule component as contained in the BCS formula.’ So LSU would win the tie based on the victory over Georgia.” Well, yeah, unless Georgia loses to Georgia Tech, but Florida also loses and Georgia stays within five places of Tennessee, so the Dawgs still make the SEC title game, where they lose again to LSU… and fall so far in the BCS that they’re behind Washington State! Hey, it could happen. Of course, if all of that does happen, USC probably beats LSU anyway…

Anyway, after almost universally blubbering on Saturday that the Trojans are assured of a Sugar Bowl berth as long as they win out, the media is slowly catching onto what we Tellshowites knew all along: that LSU has a legitimate chance to catch USC. The Associates Press reports:

Southern California moved back into position to play for the national title — for now. … USC has one game remaining Dec. 6 against Oregon State (7-4). LSU plays Arkansas (8-3) on Friday, and if the Tigers win, they will play in the SEC title game. If LSU wins both those games they could get enough of a boost to move ahead of USC. … USC is 22 spots ahead of LSU in strength of schedule this week. BCS expert Jerry Palm projects that USC could end up anywhere from 15 spots ahead to 26 spots behind.

Brad Edwards, who writes ESPN’s Road to the BCS, is all over this. He notes:

Because schedule strength is a factor in the calculations of the BCS computers, this decimal-point battle could be decided by the results of remaining games involving USC’s and LSU’s opponents. The biggest of those games will be Alabama at Hawaii because it is a head-to-head matchup between an opponent of LSU and an opponent of USC.

GO WARRIORS!!! According to one estimate, that game alone could be worth 0.32 BCS points!!! So, add Hawaii on the list next to Arkansas (and, out of lingering gratitude, Michigan) among my new favorite teams.

Meanwhile, Stewart Mandel says LSU may be more deserving than USC of the Sugar Bowl spot. This debate is raging over on Tellshow’s message board, too. The Tigers won’t get much love on this blog, but I will give them this: if they leapfrog us in the standings, I’ll be far less outraged than I would have been if Ohio State had leapfrogged us. The Buckeyes would have been an undeserving bunch of lucky underachievers. LSU has had a genuinely good season, and I wish them nothing but the best. Well, third-best, actually. :)

Some people have no sense of humor.

This week’s Newsweek has a cover story on The Return of the King!!! Excerpt:

Judging from a recent NEWSWEEK screening in New Zealand, “The Return of the King” is a sure contender for best picture. More than that, it could be the first franchise ever that didn’t, at the end of the day, let audiences down-either because of laziness, pretension, greed or other phantom menaces. This is an especially poignant possibility at a time when we can all still smell the smoke from the wreckage of “The Matrix.”

The article also reveals that Peter Jackson celebrated Guy Fawkes Day earlier this month with a family fireworks display. (Mr. Ludlow would be proud.) And, of course, there are spoilers. Click here if you dare!

I haven’t done much political blogging in recent weeks — hey, some things are more important, like football :) — but I ventured onto InstaPundit this evening and this link caught my eye. It seems a bunch of campus “liberals” at a community college in the Phoenix area are trying to silence their political opposition by crying “diversity.” Alas, this sort of thing is all too common. Money quote: “They support the First Amendment as long as the message is leftist or politically correct. Conservatives and others with differing opinions need not apply.” Curious? Read on.

The BCS standings are out, and it’s official: USC is once again #2. We lead LSU by 2.15 points.

That’s good news. Here’s better news: the projected end-of-season 0.03-point edge for USC that I mentioned yesterday was incorrect. It was based on a computing error by Rich Tellshow. The actual projected end-of-season margin, assuming 1) USC and LSU win out; and 2) LSU plays Georgia in the SEC title game; and 3) the higher-ranked team wins all strength-of-schedule games, is USC by 0.33 points. Not a wide margin, certainly, but a lot better than 0.03. :)

The bottom line is this: assuming LSU wins out, we need Georgia, not Florida or Tennessee, to be the team that LSU beats in the SEC title game. This is because LSU beat Georgia earlier in the year, so the higher Georgia is ranked in the final standings, the more quality-win points LSU gets. If Georgia wins out, but does not play in the SEC title game, they could finish as high as #5, which might give LSU enough QW points to pass USC. But if Georgia reaches the SEC title game, LSU must either lose to them (which would render the whole question moot) or win and thus knock them down several notches, perhaps even out of the top 10 altogether, and therefore significantly reduce the QW bonus.

Luckily for us, Georgia is in the SEC East driver’s seat right now. For reasons that are too complicated to explain, we are probably safe unless #93 Kentucky upsets #8 Tennessee on Saturday. But just for good measure, we should also root for #9 Florida State over #11 Florida… but we probably don’t need that one, we mostly just need Tennessee to win.

Of course, if Georgia loses to Georgia Tech, the quality-win question is moot, so we don’t care who LSU plays in the SEC title game; and if LSU loses to Arkansas, then none of this matters, and the Trojans are home free as long as we beat Oregon State in two weeks.

So here’s the bottom line. Trojan fans need one of the following things to happen this weekend:

• Arkansas beats LSU (this would be best)
• Georgia Tech beats Georgia (second-best)
• Tennessee beats Kentucky (also root for Florida State just in case)

If none of those things happen, we could be in trouble if LSU wins out. But if just one of them happens, we should be safe.

Well, relatively safe. Unexpected computer-poll hiccups (New York Times, anyone?), or a bunch of strength-of-schedule upsets that don’t go our way, could hurt USC, too.

The most important SOS game this coming weekend is Hawaii vs. Alabama, because USC played Hawaii and LSU played Alabama. The Crimson Tide is (are?) favored, so a win by the Warriors would boost our projected final total. Other key SOS games are listed here.

I’ll post a full viewer’s guide later in the week, of course. But for now…

GO RAZORBACKS!!!, or…
GO YELLOW JACKETS!!, or…
GO VOLS! (and SEMINOLES), and also…
GO WARRIORS!!

There, that about sums it up.

Don’t you love the BCS? :)

BrendanLoy.com is back online, at its new location on Total Choice Hosting’s servers. I have a lot more space and bandwidth here, for a bit less money, and the blogging processes seem to go somewhat faster. (That may be partly or entirely because I’ve also switched from a BerkeleyDB database to a MySQL database for storing my blog.)

Let me know how it seems when you comment on posts now. I find that it still takes several seconds — that’s inevitable with a blog of this size, I guess — but it’s not nearly as long of a wait as it had become on the other host’s servers.

My blog-children’s blogs are still offline, but I hope to remedy that before going to bed tonight.

UPDATE: Both viewing and editing the child-blogs remains impossible at the moment. I’ve been working on the author permissions for those blogs, but I’m exhausted now and must sleep. I’ll try to get everything humming again tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

Please let me know if you experience any other problems with the site. If I broke something, I want to fix it, and I can’t do that unless I know about it! :)

Based on early data, Tellshow is estimating a deceptively large 2.31-point lead for USC over LSU in this week’s BCS rankings. Why “deceptively” large? Because if you look at his projected end-of-season BCS rankings — assuming both teams win out, with LSU beating Georgia in the SEC title game — he has the Trojans beating the Tigers by just 0.03 points.

In other words, it’s going to be extremely close unless LSU loses.

I can’t believe it’s been just three weeks since USC beat Washington State and Virginia Tech beat previously undefeated Miami, turning the Trojans’ chances for a Sugar Bowl berth from hypothetical to real. Since then, there was a week where we thought either Florida State or Miami was going to leapfrog us, then two weeks where we feared Ohio State… and now, LSU is the new bogeyman.

It seems we can’t escape the spectre of being passed over, even though virtually every serious college-football analyst in the country believes we are the #2 team in the land, with the best chance of beating Oklahoma. If LSU loses, will two-loss Michigan somehow find a way to threaten the Trojans in the computers? Sheesh. The BCS sucks, man.

Anyway… fight on Trojans, beat the Beavers!… but first: Goooooo Arkansas! (Also, go Tennessee, go Florida State and go Georgia Tech!)

By the way, imagine if USC beats Oregon State and LSU wins the SEC title game… and Oklahoma loses the Big 12 title game, all on the same day. Suddenly, instead of two one-loss teams competing for one Sugar Bowl spot, you’d have three one-loss teams competing for two Sugar Bowl spots. Imagine the last-second chaos! The computer-generated mayhem! It’d be great! :)

The Suns won, 100-98, in the exciting game that Becky and I attended this evening at America West Arena in downtown Phoenix. Came down to the final possession… very cool. My first professional basketball game; hers too. It was a lot of fun. Way to go, Suns!