*Insert your requisite Trojan joke here*

With Oregon's 65-38 victory over Oregon State Saturday, the Rose Bowl belongs to USC as long as the Trojans beat 4-7 UCLA Saturday. Prior to Saturday's game I was asked many times by Penn State fans who I wanted to see Penn State play in the Rose Bowl and quite frankly I just don't care. Sure it would be a bit of a disappointment to play the same team Penn State already beat earlier in the season but a small part of me wanted to see USC lose the Pac-10 title to Oregon State and here's the reason why (HT:BSD):

"If it's not in the national championship game, yeah, it's a disappointment," linebacker Kaluka Maiava said. "But this is what we do. We win the Pac-10 and then own the Rose Bowl. That's our thing around here."

Yes I love the USC arrogance and it doesn't stop there we're going to be inundated with weak, lazy minded reporters who want to put Penn State in the same mold as Ohio State.

As written here before, Pasadena is a nice place to visit, but the Trojans don't
want to live there.

They don't need it for reputation.

They don't need it for recruiting.

They needed a Fiesta against a high-scoring Big 12 team, some Sugar against a traditional SEC power, anything that could enhance their national presence and propel them into next season's polls. They don't need another Rose bouquet against another Big Ten vase.

At this point, I should apologize to those e-mailers from Penn State, who were outraged when I included the Nittany Lions in a list of slow teams from the Midwest. I was wrong.

They're not really from the Midwest.

*sound of knee slapping* oh boy! What a great one-liner Bill Plaschke, you certainly are a comedian. Hey bud, before you get too big of a USC erection, allow me to point out that had it not been for the Beavers losing Saturday USC wouldn't be in the Rose Bowl at all. Let's keep the bravado down to a minimum, when USC takes care of business against weaker opponents then you can blabber on about their superiority. This happens every single season, USC loses to teams they shouldn't at the beginning of the year and then blow away their weak Pac-10 opponents and get guys like Plaschke and Jeff Miller all hot and bothered when USC misses out on the national championship game. Guess what? Like it or not, they don't deserve to be there, period. They deserve the Rose bowl until they can win out, sorry but championship teams don't lose to unranked 25-point underdogs when they are ranked #1 in the country. They just don't.

Be prepared Penn State fans we can't escape the Ohio State dogma that has taken over the media these days. Anytime 'Big Ten' and 'Bowl games' are mentioned in the same sentence everyone points to the Buckeye's struggles in the previous two championship games. Oh they won't mention Penn State's three bowl victories in a row (one against a team with SEC speed) and they want you to forget Michigan's bowl victory over Florida and their Heisman-winning quarterback, and the certainly don't want you to remember that Wisconsin is 2-1 against SEC teams in the last three years all of which the Badgers were heavy underdogs because they're one of those slow Big Ten teams against blazing SEC speed. No, forget all that just mention Big Ten and cram everyone into the Ohio State mold, that's the current recipe for lazy journalism. Don't worry, when Penn State wins we already have a 'well the Trojans weren't interested in this game that's why they lost' excuse built in.