Texas Talks a Better Game Than Cal Plays

If Kevin Weiberg, the Big 12 Conference commissioner and the Bowl Championship Series coordinator, had a dollar for every time he said, "We're going to have to go back and take a look at that" yesterday, he could have held his own B.C.S. game, taken two more teams and ended all the controversy.

A year after B.C.S. directors increased the influence of the writers' and coaches' polls, they watched five teams go undefeated -- the first time in the system's seven seasons that there were more than two major undefeated teams -- while California and Texas went 10-1.

But the biggest question was how fourth-ranked Cal won at Southern Mississippi but lost its Rose Bowl spot to Texas, which did not play Saturday.

A day after Southern Cal and Oklahoma were selected to play in the Orange Bowl, this season's B.C.S. title game, Weiberg acknowledged the system was still a mess.

"Last year we were taking a lot of criticism for too much influence of computers," Weiberg said. "We tried to develop something that was more heavily weighted towards the human voters, and we've taken a lot of criticism for that because of the impact of coaches lobbying."

Texas Coach Mack Brown urged coaches and the news media to vote the Longhorns above Cal, a move that Bears quarterback Aaron Rodgers called classless on Sunday.

But the lobbying seemed to work, as No. 6 Texas closed 23 points on No. 4 Cal in the Associated Press new media poll and the fifth-ranked Longhorns closed 43 points on the fourth-ranked Bears in the USA Today/ESPN coaches poll. That was enough to push Texas .0129 points ahead of Cal in the B.C.S. standing after being .0013 points behind.

Nine of the 65 voters in the A.P. poll moved Texas ahead of Cal in the past week, and three of them were from Texas. Keith Whitmire of The Dallas Morning News was one of them, and he said Cal's 10-point victory over Southern Mississippi was not impressive enough.

Whitmire said Brown's lobbying backfired at first, but admitted that in the long run it, "may have made people take another look."

Cal not only lost its first trip to the Rose Bowl since the 1958 season, but also fell out of the B.C.S. picture, dropping all the way to the Holiday Bowl. There were only two at-large B.C.S. spots available, and Utah clinched the other when it became the first non-B.C.S. team to finish in the top six. Cal had nowhere to turn, not even to the N.C.A.A.

"The N.C.A.A. has no role to play in postseason football in Division I-A and no authority with the process that the B.C.S. uses to place teams in bowls," said Wally Renfro, an N.C.A.A. spokesman.

Cal was supposed to play at Southern Mississippi on Sept. 16, but Hurricane Ivan forced the game to be postponed. At the time, Southern Mississippi was ranked in the top 25 and coming off a victory at Nebraska. A 26-16 Cal victory then, followed many weeks later by a season-ending 41-6 rout of Stanford, would have probably secured the No. 4 B.C.S. spot.

Yesterday, Rodgers called for a change in the system. "The only way to make it fair is take the top eight teams and have a playoff."

Jerry Palm, who runs a Web site that predicts the B.C.S. standing, said that would not fix the problem, because six conference champions would still be in the mix.

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There was some good news for Cal yesterday, when Coach Jeff Tedford agreed to a five-year contract through the 2009 season.

Tedford, who inherited a team that was 1-10 in 2001, had three years remaining on his contract. The new contract will guarantee Tedford $1.5 million a year, a $350,000 raise from his salary this season, and incentives.

Coaches Coming and Staying

The Syracuse chancellor Nancy Cantor made the decision yesterday to retain Coach Paul Pasqualoni for a 15th year after meeting with the outgoing athletic director Jake Crouthamel to assess the 2004 season.

Syracuse finished 6-5 and will play Georgia Tech in the Champs Sports Bowl on Dec. 21 in Orlando.

Pasqualoni is 107-58-1 in 14 seasons at Syracuse and 6-2 in bowl games.

Meanwhile, the former Florida coach Ron Zook is expected to be named the head football coach at Illinois today. Zook's hiring will be announced at a 1 p.m. news conference, two senior university officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Zook will replace Ron Turner, who was fired Nov. 22. (AP)