Time to get relevant

MADISON, Wis. – Congratulations, Washington.

We’ve analyzed, digitized and bowdlerized the relative relevance of our 50 states in the wonderful world of college football – and what could be more relatively relevant than college football? – and ranked them, from least to most.

You guessed it. We’re No. 1!

This may not be news you were hoping for as the 2007 season begins. Well, after the 2007 season has begun. Though the pomp and pageantry of the Thursday night kickoff to the season is a proud college football tradition dating back to, oh, whenever ESPN decided it needed the programming, our crack ratings bureau hasn’t quite made the adjustment and is still making believe the fun begins today.

But never mind. These mensurations are not at the mercy of a single weekend’s games – or midweek games. Even Washington’s giddy win on Friday night at Syracuse will not have any noticeable impact, except perhaps to launch the Louis Rankin-for-Heisman campaign, which you’ll be able to enjoy for one more week. The unfortunate mitigation to the Huskies’ joy is that the mighty Orange will engage in a season-long duel with the Stanford Cardinal for the honor being the worst BCS football team in the land.

This is what having a color for a mascot will do for you.

Washington State, meanwhile, at least has the decency to open its season today at Wisconsin, rather than poaching attention from high schools’ big night. And if the Cougars happen to keep it as close as the 14-point spread being used to entice gamblers, well, not bad.

But irrelevance will not be reversed in a week.

Not as long as it took the Cougars and Huskies to get to this point.

How is it that we’ve come to declare Washington as the national champion of irrelevance? Glad you asked.

Surely you’ve come across one of those lists that ranks the nation’s major college teams from 1 to 119. Sports Illustrated does one, ESPN does one, nearly every keyboard jockey sitting around in his Jockeys does one.

They are, of course, worthless. For while it is all so obvious to proclaim USC as the nation’s No. 1 team, the guesswork that distinguishes Florida Atlantic from Florida International down there in the 100s isn’t obvious at all. Indeed, it’s not obvious that those are two different schools – even to the citizens of Florida.

Still, the 1-to-119 lists are meant to be conversation pieces, so let’s converse. What we’ve done here is taken one such compilation, culled the 32 states that have more than one Division I-A – sorry, FBS – football team and averaged the rankings of the top two teams.

And what we’ve discovered is that only four – Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and New York – come out worse than the state of Washington. Technically, that doesn’t make us last, except that Washington is the only one of those states with two BCS schools and it’s hard to do much chest-thumping if you’re keeping company with New Mexico State and UNLV.

Yet by even another measurement do those other four states outstrip ours, for all have had one of their teams play in a bowl game sometime in the last three years – Nevada and New Mexico as recently as last year, Colorado and Colorado State in 2005 and Syracuse in 2004. The same holds true for the nine states that have only one Division I-A program.

Yes, these days everybody goes to a bowl game.

Everybody but the Cougars and Huskies.

It’s bad enough that the Pacific-10 Conference seems to be awash in PR problems – or at least the nine teams that aren’t USC. Since the league hasn’t put a second school into one of the BCS bowls since 2002 and has no bowl exposure at all east of Fort Worth, it is somehow being regarded as little more than a glorified version of the WAC. This rap was helped along by the summer diatribe of LSU coach Les Miles, who apparently worked up the courage to pile on the Pac-10 after whipping up on Arizona State by four points a year ago and Oregon State by a point the year before.

To disabuse the nation of this notion, it would be helpful if the Pac-10 didn’t bellyflop in some of these early intersectionals, and to that end the Huskies did their part Friday night – though it will probably be long forgotten once they’ve had to contend with Boise State and Ohio State.

But the greater challenge for both state teams is making themselves relevant in the context of the conference, and that is probably even more urgent for the Cougars. The idea that Wazzu football fortunes will always be cyclical is a favorite security blanket, but in fact it’s been 20 years since the Cougars went four seasons without a bowl trip. On top of which, the Cougs have endured three seasons of indignities just to get to the all-important point of having a senior quarterback. Turning things around without one next year is not a problem coach Bill Doba is eager to tackle – and he may not get to.

It’s what makes this Wazzu season so very relevant to him, if not to anybody else on the college football planet.