You know USC has time on its hands when Caesar has time to do an interview with satellite radio show hosts Gary Danielson and Jack Arute. Here’s his views on the BCS.
Host, Gary Danielson: “Pete, one of the things that I think college football is missing is we all as a nation admire players performing in the clutch and coming through when the pressure is on and the BCS doesn’t really reward that. Last year LSU was an outstanding team. They could beat anybody just like you could beat anybody. When they were playing that last game of the year for the SEC Championship, after the game I promise you they thought they had blown the season the week before. They weren’t even feeling like they had worked their way into the National Championship Game. The same for Ohio State at the end of the year. Don’t you think that’s the one thing the BCS doesn’t do? It doesn’t reward improvement and it doesn’t reward clutch performance?”
Pete Carroll: “Well, you know, I don’t know how the system works, guys. I really don’t understand the computers and stuff like that, how this thing figures in. I’d like to talk to the computers but they won’t respond. There’s something to do with style points and something to do with who you’re playing all that kind of stuff that weighs in on it. To me, I really don’t even care about it because there is nothing I can do about it. All we can do is keep playing. I’ll always stand for I wish we could have a way to play things off and see who the last guy standing is because America likes that. Coaches and players all want that. There’s nobody who doesn’t want that except for administrators. I’ve battled with them on that conversation forever that that’s not the way we all want to see it, but it is what it is and we can’t do anything about it so were not going to gripe about it. We’re just going to keep playing and see how many games we can win and wherever it winds up it winds up and we’ll try to make the most of our opportunities.”
Host, Jack Arute: “You may not be able to change it but I wonder if you sense that there may be a little bit of a leaning towards it more than, let’s say, a couple of years ago in your conversations with administrators?”
Carroll: “Well, maybe so. There’s an old guard here that I don’t know who that is or where they are but they exist somewhere out there. They’ve really worked hard to protect the bowl game situation for a lot of reasons, I guess, that I don’t understand. And I’m a traditional guy, man, I love the bowl match-ups like we have. I love the Big Ten and the Pac-10 matching up and all that kind of stuff, but let’s keep playing. Let’s keep going, you know? We can have fun doing that and we can do a little bit more, too. I don’t know. I’m not sensing that there’s any kind of an opening for it at all to tell you the truth. But as the BCS continues to get challenged and the system and all that maybe somewhere along the lines somebody will see it differently but right now I’m not going to worry about it. We’re going to try to win this week and see what happens next.”