USC, OU Top Latest BCS Rankings

NEW YORK -- After an impressive prime time romp over Notre Dame, Southern California has just about locked up a trip to the Orange Bowl.

The Trojans remained in the top spot of the latest Bowl Championship Series poll released Monday.

USC (11-0), which is ranked first in both human polls, maintained the top spot with an average of .9834 - up from .9789 last week.

A virtual lock for the Orange Bowl, the Trojans close out the regular season against Pac-10 rival UCLA on Saturday. It appears that only an upset by the Bruins will keep USC from playing for the national championship.

Latest BCS Rankings | Big 12 Championship Central

Oklahoma (11-0), which was idle last week, had an average of .9642 last week and slipped slightly to .9611. The Sooners will close out the season Saturday in the Big 12 title game against Colorado.

Last season, the Sooners were also undefeated heading into the Big 12 title game but were beaten, 35-7 by then No. 13 Kansas State. Oklahoma did not face Colorado in the regular season and won the last meeting, 34-20 last October.

Auburn (11-0), ranked third in the computer rankings as well as both human polls, dropped from .9356 to .9342 during an off week. The Tigers will face Tennessee in the SEC Championship on Saturday and likely need Oklahoma or USC to lose this week to get a shot at the national title.

Auburn is 11-0 for only the second time in school history and the sixth team in SEC history to go 8-0 in league play since 1992 when the two-division format was adopted. The last two teams to pull off that feat - Florida in 1996 and Tennessee in 1998 - both won national titles.

California (9-1) held onto fourth at .8431, down from last week's ranking of .8504, while Texas (10-1) and Utah (11-0) remained fifth and sixth at .8418 and .8224, respectively.

Texas and Utah both improved from its rankings of .8301 and .8172 in last week's polls. The Longhorns are in a battle with California for an at-large bid while Utah seems to have the other at-large invitation to the BCS party locked up.

The Golden Bears travel to Southern Miss on Saturday while Texas, which has never played in a BCS game, will sit and wait for the final BCS poll to be released next Sunday.

If Utah, which closed out its regular season with a 52-21 thrashing of Brigham Young on November 20, remains in the top six when the final BCS poll is released, it will become the first team from outside the six BCS conferences to earn a berth in one of the four lucrative BCS bowl games.

Georgia (.6948) swapped spots with Boise State (.6510) and moved up into seventh and the Broncos (11-0) are eighth despite a 58-21 thrashing of Nevada. Louisville (.6379) benefited from its 70-7 romp over Cincinnati and jumped over Miami (.6342) into ninth and the Hurricanes complete the top 10.

Miami takes on Virginia Tech (9-2) which is ranked 12th in the BCS, on Saturday with the winner earning the Atlantic Coast Conference title and an automatic BCS berth. The Hurricanes need a victory to extend its BCS bowl bid streak to five years.

At the end of last season, USC was ranked first in both the media and coaches' polls but sat third in the BCS standings behind Louisiana State and Oklahoma, which went on to play in the Sugar Bowl.

LSU beat the Sooners while USC beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl, leading to a split national championship and an overhaul of the BCS formula.

This year, the formula consists of three evenly weighed elements: a team's percentage of points in both the media poll and coaches' polls and an average of four computer ratings. The formula no longer has a strength-of-schedule component - though the computers do account for it - nor are teams penalized a point for each loss or rewarded for a quality win.

The teams' poll percentages consist of their number of voting points divided by the maximum amount available in each poll, 1,625 in the media poll and 1,525 in the coaches' poll. These numbers better reflect how writers and coaches view relative differences between the teams than a straight average of the two polls.

Six computer rankings are used this season: Anderson & Hester, Jeff Sagarin, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Massey and Peter Wolfe. The best and worst rating for each team is ignored, with the remaining four totals added together and divided by 100 to produce a ratings percentage.

BCS members include the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10 and Southeastern Conferences as well as Notre Dame. The format calls for the championship game to be rotated among the Orange, Rose, Sugar and Fiesta Bowls.

University of Oklahoma Athletics

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