Pac-10 Tables Turned - Cal Ranked #2, USC Ranked #10

Wow. read it and weap! Plus, USC's coming to Cal in November. This is going to be a game for the ages!

LSU is unanimous No. 1 after week of upsets; USC falls to No. 10 - Associated Press
NEW YORK -- No doubt about it, LSU is No. 1.

As for the rest of the Top 25, five wild weeks of college football have taken quite a toll.

The Tigers were a unanimous choice for the top spot in The Associated Press rankings released Sunday, receiving all 65 first-place from the media panel. The last unanimous No. 1 during the regular season was Ohio State in December.

LSU is one of just four teams that started the season ranked in the top 10 and remain there. The others are No. 6 Oklahoma, No. 8 West Virginia and No. 10 Southern California, which became the latest team to take a tumble after a startling loss to an unranked opponent.

The Trojans fell to Stanford 24-23 on Saturday, then dropped eight spots in the rankings.

California is the new No. 2, with its best showing in the AP Top 25 since 1951, when the Golden Bears were No. 1.

Ohio State is No. 3 and No. 4 Boston College has its highest ranking since Doug Flutie had the Eagles fourth in 1984. South Florida, which entered the poll for the first time three weeks ago, is now No. 5.

A week before the first Bowl Championship Series standings are released, LSU is a unanimous No. 1 in all the major polls. In the coaches' poll, the rest of the top five is California, Ohio State and Boston College while Oklahoma and South Florida are tied for fifth.
In the Harris poll, the top four are the same as the AP and coaches' poll, but Oklahoma holds the No. 5 spot all to itself with USF sixth. The Harris and coaches' polls are part of the formula to determine which teams will play in the BCS national title game Jan. 7 in New Orleans.

A week after half the top 10 and nine ranked teams lost, another four top-10 teams and 11 ranked teams overall went down Saturday.

As a result, there are 10 teams in the latest rankings, including four in the top 10 (BC, USF, No. 7 South Carolina and No. 9 Oregon), that were unranked to start the season.

Coach Steve Spurrier has led South Carolina to its highest ranking since Dec. 12, 1984, when the Gamecocks were also seventh.
"It's nice, very nice," Spurrier said Sunday. "We appreciate it. Obviously it's good for our football program, for our university and all that, but we realize that it's almost exactly halfway through the season, six games, a lot can happen in the next six."

The second 10 starts with No. 11 Missouri, which has its highest ranking since 1981, when the Tigers were No. 8.

No. 12 Virginia Tech is followed by Florida and then three unbeaten teams -- Arizona State, Cincinnati and Hawaii. No. 17 Kentucky fell nine spots after losing at South Carolina 38-23 on Thursday.

Five teams fell from the rankings this week. Illinois, which beat No. 5 Wisconsin 31-26, and unbeaten Kansas, which won at Kansas State for the first time since 1989, moved into the poll for the first time this season.

The Illini are No. 18 and ranked for the first time since 2001. Kansas is No. 20 and ranked for the first time since 1995. In between is No. 19 Wisconsin, which dropped 14 spots after its first loss of the season.

No. 21 Florida State, winners of four straight, moved back into the Top 25, as did No. 22 Auburn. No. 23 Texas benefited from so many other ranked teams losing and stayed in the poll after a second consecutive loss. The Longhorns fell to Oklahoma 28-21.

No. 24 Georgia dropped 12 spots after a 35-14 defeat to Tennessee, and the Vols moved back into the rankings at No. 25, giving the Southeastern Conference seven ranked teams, the most of any conference.

Falling out of the Top 25 were Nebraska, Clemson, Kansas State, Rutgers and Purdue.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press

Stanford Shocks USC 24-23 - Southern Cal Loses To Cardinal

It's hard to tell who's more shocked over Stanford's improbable 24-23 win over Number 1 or Number 2 ranked USC, Cardinal Fans or USC Fans , or College Football fans .

Or for that matter, me.

When I thought about the Stanford / USC matchup, it never occured to me that this would happen. It wasn't even on my radar screen to see it. I happened to hear it flipping the radio tuner and stopped. I was expecting that USC would be clobbering Stanford. And even when I learned that the Cardinal was only six points down with just over 2 minutes left, I thought to myself, "watch their fear of success doom them."

That's what I thought.

And those final two minutes gave me a lot of reasons to think that, from the several near-interception throws, to the final holding penalty on Stanford, and then the 12-men-on-the-field penalty, to the 4th down -- 4th down -- touchdown pass. It seemed that Stanford would almost -- but not -- win the game.

But, just as in life, they had chance after chance, and one of them turned up in their favor when it mattered most as this video shows:



And when it did, I screamed. I hollered. I'd wished I was at a sports bar just to see the reactions. Even the annoucer couldn't believe it, screaming "Touchdown USC! No! Stanford! Stanford!" Geez.

What's cool about this is it proves that nothing is certain, nothing is given, and it's all up to God. Think about it. The winning quarterback Tavita Pritchard, a sophomore from Tacoma, Wash., filling in for the injured starter T.C. Ostrander, completed 11-of-30 for 149 yards and the winning TD in his first college game as a starter.

Wow. Another reason to expect a Stanford loss. But it didn't happen.

I thought about going down to Stanford to celebrate the victory. After all, looking at this video from the Stanford campus celebration, you can see it was fun:



USC QB John David Booty who threw four interceptions, said of the loss, "You just gotta deal with it and move on."

The Meaning Of The Number 4

What they've got to deal with is the biggest upset in college football history. Stanford was a 40-point-underdog and pulled out a game that's marked with spritual references to the number 4: 24 -- the Stanford score; 14 -- Stanford QB Tavita Pritchard's jersy number; 4th down -- the down the TD pass was thrown -- 4 interceptions thrown by USC QB John David Booty; 4 -- the number of sacks by the Stanford Defense. What is it about the number 4? Well, is seems that the number has some real significance.

In Buddhism:

The Group of Fours 1. The Four Noble Truths 1. Suffering 2. The Cause of Suffering 3. The Cessation of Suffering 4. The Way Leading to the Cessation of Suffering

2. The Four Mental Principles 1. Wisdom (Panna) 2. Truthfulness (Sacca) 3. Abandonment of evil and selfishness (Caga) 4. Appeasement (Upasama)

3. The Four Bases of Success 1. Appreciation (Chanda) 2. Effort (Viriya) 3. Attention (Citta) 4. Investigation (Vimamsa)

4. The Four Divine States of Mind 1. Loving-kindness (Metta) 2. Compassion (Karuna) 3. Sympathetic joy over others' achievement (Mudita) 4. Equanimity (Upekkha)

5. The Four Virtues Conducive to Social Welfare 1. Generosity (Dana) 2. Kind Speech (Piyavaca) 3. Benevolence (Atthacaritya) 4. Adaptability (Samanattata)

6. The Fourfold Right Effort: 1. Effort to restrain from evil 2. Effort to abandon evil 3. Effort to develop good 4. Effort to maintain good

4 Virtues According to Plato:
Wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice.

Considering that Stanford was suffering, given their being waxed by Arizona State and losing their starting QB the week before, the 4s came into play, but it seems to mean that in this, Stanford has finished their journey through the road to success and achieved it, and in doing so reached a divine state of mind.

Will the Cardinal run the table and win all of its remaining games? Even this Cal fan has to admit the possibility seems real. I know it places a bigger light on this year's Big Game.

Boy this is a fun year!