(Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit are really just a symptom of the problem.)

Look. I'm not gonna argue or say that the Trojans couldn't have kicked some major butt in a playoff system. It's what I want to see personally; I've been an advocate of the 16-team playoff (11 conference champs, five at-larges) for a while now, and I think you could give our pie pieces to everyone, with Florida having the most this season as BCS champion. I can't wait for the thing to be blown up.

But I've accepted the fact that USC wasn't gonna sniff the Mythical National Championship after a bad first half in Corvallis that led to the sole loss of the season, considering that USC was the only elite team in a conference stacked with mediocrity (although that's 5-0 mediocrity in bowl games, mind you) and two complete abominations in U-Dub and Wazzu. 

This is why watching the post-BCS talk shows and hearing Four-Letter talking heads like Lee Corso continually repeat that USC is the best in the country is so darn frustrating: because I know that those kind of analysts piss other fans off, and rightfully so. Really, they are not helping matters at all.

It's a flawed system, but Pete Carroll and the squad had every chance to take advantage of it by not playing a bad game on Thursday night. We didn't do it, and were stuck with the whims of the Coaches' Poll and Harris voters, along with the computers, who had our strength of schedule very low, and it didn't work to our advantage. Such is life, but it's really way too late.

So let it go, analysts -- the Trojans were very, very good, but no quite good enough. To suggest as much is an insult to Florida, who won the BCS trophy, and particularly to Utah, a school with a real complaint on its hands more than a week after the fact.