The season’s first Bowl Championship Series rankings are out, so my weekly Race to the Rose Bowl will now be based on the BCS rankings instead of on the Coaches’ Poll.

Here’s how the first BCS top ten shapes up:

Newcomers UCLA and Texas Tech find themselves in the top ten with 6-0 records, while Florida State dropped after a loss to Virginia.

Notre Dame dropped and starts the BCS race at No. 16, which I think is way too low. How often do you lose a game by making a Heisman Trophy winner fumble the ball?

And while I’m on that topic, while USC deserved to win that game because they made big play after big play every time they needed to, Notre Dame also deserved to win because they executed an ingenious game plan almost to perfection and only lost because of a couple of bad breaks at the very end. Had Matt Leinart not fumbled the ball on the second to last play of the game, the clock would have run out and the Fighting Irish would have won. Had the officials spotted the ball on the three yard line (where the ball went out of bounds) instead of the one yard line (where Leinart landed), the game would certainly have been different is some way. And had USC tailback Reggie Bush not pushed (I heard someone say that that’s not even legal, but I don’t know) a back-peddling-for-a-second-chance Leinart into the end zone, the Irish would have won.

Notre Dame has lost two games: one they would have won had they not had three breaks go against them, and one in overtime to a good Michigan State team. They deserve to be ranked higher than No. 16.

This slight tangentially affects the Tennessee Volunteers, who need to play (and beat) as many good teams as they can in order to improve their standing. The Vols start the BCS race at No. 19, and highlights of their resume to this point include:

• a loss at Florida when the Gators were ranked No. 7 (now ranked No. 20);
• a big win at LSU when the Tigers were ranked No. 4. (now No. 5); and
• a loss to Georgia when the Bulldogs were ranked No. 4 (still No. 4).

Tennessee is scheduled to play No. 5 Alabama this Saturday and a should-be-in-the-top-ten Notre Dame team two weeks after that. In between those two big games, they host Steve Spurrier and South Carolina.

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See the Race to the Rose Bowl from the beginning:

• Week Six
• Week Five
• Week Four
• Week Three
• Week Two
• Week One
• Preseason

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Alabama, Bowl Championship Series, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Notre Dame, Rankings, South Carolina, Tennessee, Tennessee Volunteer Football, Texas Tech, UCLA, USC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.