Note to Pete Carroll

OK Pete, your team is good. Really good. Nobody is going to argue that. The Trojans have peaked at the right time and are obviously playing their best football to end the season. That was on display in the Rose Bowl as USC pummeled Illinois 49-17 on New Year's Day. But Pete, year after year it is also obvious that you must have no idea how the current college football season works. Frankly I'm getting tired of the annual pity party you like to throw for yourself and your football team at the end of each regular season and after your bowl victories. Let me just explain a couple of things for you. Just to be clear, there is no playoff in Division 1 college football. That's not to say that there shouldn't be, but under the current system we play bowl games. That's just the way it is. Two teams are picked based on their entire body of work, all 12 games, and those two teams get to play for our National Championship. How your team starts and how they play during the heart of the schedule counts just as much as how they finish. Despite the fact USC looked really good in yesterday's Rose Bowl, this year your Trojans were not one of those teams. Probably mostly due to the fact that you lost to Stanford at home back in October. Remember that 4-8 team that came into your Coliseum as 40-point underdogs and left with a world-shocking upset win? So maybe when your thinking about how good your team looks and how it's a shame they didn't get the chance to play for a National Title you can look back at that loss and your loss to Oregon as the reasons instead of blaming it on the same Bowl system we've had in college football for decades. Now I'm not saying that USC, and Georgia as well for that matter, aren't playing some of the best football in the nation right now. Without having seen Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma and others to play in the next few days yet, USC and UGA most certainly look like "damn good football teams" to quote LSU coach Les Miles. But the point I am making here is that this is college football and college football does not have a playoff system and hasn't ever had a playoff system. Pete Carroll is a college football coach. He knows from week one how this works. He's been at it for many years now. When he was hoisting up those back-to-back BCS Championship Trophies, Pete Carroll didn't seem to have much of a problem with the system. So now that you are not on the field January 7th don't give me this "Would I love to still be playing right now? Sure would" junk. After all you are Rose Bowl Champion, and that was your team's goal from the outset, right?