At the end of a weekend crazy enough to cap the craziest season in recent memory, we find a total reordering of the BCS. Here we go.

The first big shock was huge: Big East power West Virginia somehow managed to choke and choke hard, falling to unranked Pitt and thereby becoming the 6th second-ranked team this year to fall, and the 5th to an unranked team. Ouch. Say buh-bye to the title hunt, boys. On the other hand, they did give Pitt its first road win in 14 months. Pitt, for their part, improve to 5 and 7.

Unshocking in the extreme was overrated Mizzou finding itself unable to match Oklahoma. OU dominated the Missouri Tigers even more convincingly than in their regular season matchup back in October; the final score was 38 to 17, and OU claimed its second Big XII title in a row (amusingly, they’ll face the former #2 in the Fiesta Bowl).

With both #1 and #2 off the list, then, where does the BCS go? Well, wonder no more, little buddies, for the answer is known: the title game will feature LSU vs. Ohio State.

How’d we get here? LSU comes in the back door, by claiming the SEC title in their win over Tennessee on Saturday. Ohio State — in their capacity as the the old #3 — is an obvious choice to promote to the big game; they’re 11-1, and the 1 was a shocker against Illinois. LSU, though, requires some explanation. The prior rankings went Mizzou, West Virginia, OSU, Georgia, Kansas, Virginia Tech, LSU. The #1 and #2 losses outlined above clearly disqualify those teams, and OSU is in the show already, which brings us to the matter of Georgia. The 10-2 Bulldogs were for some reason ranked higher than LSU or Tennessee, but they’re manifestly not the SEC champs (they lost to Tennessee, who then lost the SEC title game to LSU), so they get kicked to the curb. (We agree that you can’t expect to play for the brass ring if you don’t win your division.) Kansas is, well, Kansas; they played candyasses all year, and the BCS voters know it. VaTech may be the ACC champs after beating BC on Saturday, but they’ve got just as many losses as LSU, and one of those was a cajun-style 48 to 7 ass-whippin’ from LSU back in September. Which brings us right back to Baton Rouge. (The fact that it took 6 OTs for LSU to lose twice didn’t hurt them.)

What a mess. It would’ve made more sense if the rankings past #2 last week made any sense; the calculus required above makes it clear that Nos. 3 through whatever were pretty much random, because when it came time to pick a new top pair, the BCS realized that their old #4, #5, and #6 needed to be skipped for the top game to make sense, and that means the whole list is a clusterfuck. Frankly, we hope there are many, many more years like this so that everyone sees that the only fair thing is for the NCAA to have a Division I tournament for football just like they do for the lower divisions and just like they do for basketball. There are plenty of plans out there they could adopt, and — quite frankly, and pardon my french — fuck the bowl sponsors. This whole this-bowl and that-bowl proliferation is absurd, and needs to be exposed for the fraud it is.

Finally, there’s one more lovely thing afoot. Very late last night, Colt Brennan and his Hawai’i Warriors managed to rally from 21 points back to win against Washington, 35 to 28, thereby staying perfect and making it impossible for any just system to keep them out of a BCS bowl. (Brennan was 42 of 50, including 6 for 6 in his final 76-yard drive; Hawai’i’s final 28 points were unanswered by the Huskies, who did not score in the second half.) They got their wish: they’ll meet Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. We don’t expect Georgia to have much trouble with the Warriors, but we’ll be rooting against our conference anyway. Hawai’i has tried to play big teams for a while now, to show folks they’re for real, and they’ve been frustrated because quite frankly nobody wants any part of their offense. USC flat out refused to schedule them. They deserve a shot at a good team and a good bowl, and I’m looking forward to watching it. Where can I get a Hawai’i jersey?

Evel Knievel is dead.

As previously noted, Bower was a positive bargain in the world of Division I-A coaches. This bit from the hometown rag notes that the trustees will have to step up the money to entice anyone to take over the somewhat backwater program; the ugly truth is that most offensive/defensive coordinators in the SEC make more than Bower got as head coach.

Pat Forde over at ESPN has a bit up about the coaching carnage, and had this to say about USM and Jeff Bower:

Jeff Bower, Southern Mississippi

Record: 119-82-1 overall, 7-5 this season.

Shock value: Immediate Dash reaction was, “No freakin’ way.” This has to be the stupidest move of Coaching Carousel Season, no matter what else is to come. (OK, if USC boots Pete Carroll tomorrow, that might be worse.) All Bower has done is compile 14 straight winning seasons, and 15 out of 17, at a school that should never mistake itself for Alabama. Put it this way: Bower’s run is comparable to Fisher DeBerry’s at Air Force or Sonny Lubick’s at Colorado State; they named the field for Lubick at CSU and DeBerry got to hand-pick is his successor. Bower deserved similar respect.

Capital offense: Hell if The Dash knows.

Will he coach again: Absolutely, if he wants to.

How good is the job: It’ll be attractive to some hot young assistants or lower-level head coaches who want to pad their resume for a couple of years and then upgrade. Most established coaches will look at what the school did to Bower and steer clear.

Successor: Nobody who would be willing to put 17 years of sweat equity into the place, that’s for sure. They saw what happened to the last guy who did that.

Longtime Heathen and USM alum Ear O’Corn points us here, which makes the case that perhaps Bower had it coming for lackluster performance compared to the 90s. However, even the linked article notes

…the move is obviously a risky one, because the odds of USM getting another boss that meets the expectations of a conference championship every three years or so – or that even does what Bower did in guiding the program to eleven bowl games in twelve years – are dramatically lower than the odds of hiring a worn-out retread or generic coach who turns the program into Memphis or UAB, a mediocre team with a seven or eight-win ceiling and a two or three-win floor, and hardly any way to distinguish which result you may get from year-to-year. This describes most of Conference USA right now, and the only reason it hasn’t described Southern Miss as far as I can tell is that Jeff Bower, at the very least, has never allowed the bottom to fall out to such an embarrassing degree. So the Eagles can do much, much worse, and the odds may be that they will.

Can they do better? Yes – briefly. A young hire that pays off in quick success is certainly possible, and will be great for the program in the short term, before he’s poached for big bucks by a bigger school on his way up the ladder. Mid-majors all want to make the splash hire, the Urban Meyer, Bobby Petrino, Steve Kragthorpe, Dennis Franchione, Dirk Koetter, Dan Hawkins who will take the program back into the polls, but the reality is that those coaches will move up quickly or, if they stay – like Bower or his nearest longtime parallels, Pat Hill at Fresno State and simultaneously-deposed Sonny Lubick at Colorado State – they will eventually succumb to the limitations of the location and drift back to the pack, and that coach will eventually stagnate and be forced out. See not only Bower and Lubick, but LaVell Edwards and Fisher DeBerry before them. Hill’s time will come. Chris Peterson will be paid lavishly soon to leave Boise State; ditto Bronco Mendenhall at BYU, or else his program will eventually move to the middle, too, as it did for Edwards. There are no exceptions to this.

I prefer Southern go the supernova route, hire a young, innovative guy and hope he pays spectacular dividends before moving on. At least we’d have those three or four great seasons and get a glimpse at the moon before descending back to Earth. Because in the long run, Southern Miss is just Southern Miss, and I don’t know that anyone can do a better job with that over an extended period of time than Jeff Bower.

Emphasis added.

Via Frank, we get this excellent idea from Yahoo! Sports writer Dan Wetzel. Go. Read.

So true. There’s more, including:

Just last week BCS administrators had to tweak their “system” for about the billionth time. The latest bandage was applied after it became apparent that the BCS might not have enough eligible at-large teams for its five games. Oops. The BCS works so well that the only undefeated team in the country, Hawaii, could finish the regular season 12-0 and still get squeezed out of a BCS bowl game. Meanwhile, two-loss Georgia, which didn’t even win its conference division or qualify for its league championship game, could conceivably play in a national title game. Huh?

Go read the whole thing.

ESPN’s Maisel has some good bits to say:

For years, Bower’s name received mention as a coaching candidate at programs with more resources than he has at Southern Mississippi. He stayed out of a sense of loyalty and family. He stayed, and now the school and its fans have left him.

Southern Mississippi begins a search for a coach who fits what it needs more than Bower does. It won’t happen. The Golden Eagles will find that out soon enough.

The rest of the SEC can keep on making fun of departing Arkansas coach Houston Nutt, as he’s been picked up by Ole Miss.

Southern Miss has apparently ousted head coach Jeff Bower after 17 seasons and a 119-81-1 record. Apparently, 14 consecutive winning seasons (7-5 this year, which is as good as Croom at MSU and better than Ole Miss), 9 bowl games in the last 10 years, and a trip to the Conference USA title game five times since 1996 isn’t enough for somebody. Hell, they’ve even got a bowl game this year.

USM has it hard; they’re perceived as a second tier program in the south because, at least in part, they’re not in the SEC. Consequently, many of the marquee high school players get picked up by the major programs in Oxford and Starkville and Baton Rouge. Even so, Bower — an alum — has had success there; it’s also a sure bet he’d stay forever due to his roots in the community.

From the Clarion-Ledger:

Bower was forced to resign during a meeting with USM athletic director Richard Giannini. Bower stormed out of the USM athletic department offices and went to his house. He could not be reached for comment.

[…]

The Golden Eagles (7-5) clinched a 14th consecutive winning season with a 16-10 victory over Arkansas State Saturday and received an invitation to the Papajohns.com Bowl in Birmingham. It will be the school’s ninth bowl trip in the last 10 years.

Although USM has the fifth-longest current streak of consecutive winning seasons among Division I-A teams, many USM fans have been critical of the program in the last several years.

Picked by league coaches as the preseason favorite to win Conference USA, the Golden Eagles finished fourth in the C-USA East with a 5-3 record. That included a home losses to previously winless Rice and to Memphis in a game that USM led by 12 with five minutes to play.

USM won four Conference USA championships under Bower, the last in 2003. The Golden Eagles won the C-USA East Division last year, but lost to Houston in the C-USA championship game. He was named the league’s coach of the decade in 2004 and was a three-time coach of the year (1997, ’99, ’03).

We predict a shitty season for the Golden Eagles next year, and for years to come. Folks are, predictably, annoyed.

(More bits: only 4 teams have longer streaks of winning seasons: Florida State (31), Michigan (23), Florida (20) and Virginia Tech (15) (cite). Bower’s tenure at USM is behind only 3 other coaches: Paterno, obviously, at 42 years; Bowden’s been at FSU for 32; and Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer is at 21.)

(Even better: a recent news bit at CoachBower.com notes preseason ticket sales were at an all time high before the 2007 kickoff, and cited the ongoing success of Bower’s Eagles as the proximate reason. (Thanks, Frank.))