College Football Week 3 Review: Woe is Paine

USC aside, this weekend was probably the worst case scenario for the Pac-10. The conference went 3-7, and those 7 losses include Cal's loss to Maryland, Arizona State's loss to UNLV, UCLA's loss to BYU, and Arizona's loss to New Mexico (Stanford, Washington, and Wazzu lost, but... duh, who cares).

Cal's loss might not seem bad from the score, but in reality it was a basting. It wasn't so much that Maryland was better than Cal as that Cal was even worse than Maryland. Cal's offensive line, which includes the best center in the country, Alex Mack, gave up 5 sacks, and Mack took a costly penalty for a stupid late hit that ruined a crucial 4th quarter drive. Jahvid Best, who I expected would continue to romp his way into dark horse Heisman considerations, had 25 yards rushing, less than 100 yards total, and no touchdowns. Shane Vereen had even fewer running yards, 23, and two receptions for -1 yards. Kevin Riley was so horrible for 3 quarters that I started yelling at the tv to put in Brock Mansion (the third liner, because even though Longshore has a good arm, he can't scramble, and with the offensive line playing so horribly that would have been no good). He and most of the rest of the team started playing more like themselves with like 8 minutes to go in the game, but that's just not gonna cut it, especially with the new 40-second game clock. This was a terrible loss, truly.

But I'm even more surprised by Arizona State's loss to UNLV. UNLV, even worse than Maryland with only 8 wins in the last four years, and Arizona State, better than Cal and expected to make a run at a BCS bowl this year. The loss came in overtime, so it was close, but in this matchup, anything near close is miserable for ASU.

I'm not super surprised that BYU beat UCLA, just shocked by the score. UCLA's strength is its defense and BYU's weakness is its defense, and yet UCLA's defense played like total crap and its offense couldn't get anything going despite having one of the best play-callers in the country in Norm Chow. It was UCLA's worst loss in 8 decades.

The conference's 3-7 record this week is probably a little misleading, overly optimistic-sounding even. One of those wins was Oregon's bare double-ot survival against Purdue, a win that really can't be celebrated by anyone and will certainly lead to a drop in the rankings for the Ducks.

Look, I mean, the Mountain West conference swept the Pac-10 this week. BYU over UCLA, New Mexico over Arizona, UNLV over Arizona State, and Texas Christian over Stanford. That's just... inexcusable.

Coming into this week, the Pac-10 had 4 ranked teams (USC, ASU, Oregon, and Cal) and another team just outside (UCLA); if those teams had won their games, especially ASU and Cal playing pattycake losers, the conference could have had 5 teams in the top 20. Instead, Cal's out, and I can't imagine them getting more than a dozen votes this week. UCLA's obviously totally off the national radar now, and they probably won't get any votes at all. I don't think ASU should be dropped out of the rankings entirely, but they'll probably end up near the end of the list, and honestly I wouldn't be too surprised if they ended up unranked. Oregon won, so they won't drop out, but they'll definitely drop below Penn State, BYU, and South Florida, so they're looking at around #18-20. We still have the #1 overall (by a huge margin, no doubt), but then there's one or two teams near the end of the top 25 and nothing else. Pathetic.