For those who have asked, yes, the Rose Bowl committee did indeed get first choice of available teams to invite to play USC.

And yes, the Rose Bowl did invite the worst of the teams to get into a BCS bowl, No. 13 Illinois.

And yes, Illinois did indeed lose to Missouri, the deserving Big 12 team that was ranked No. 1 in the nation until it got smoked by Oklahoma in the league title game Saturday.

And yes Missouri indeed got the shaft considering the team it beat a week ago, Kansas, did get a bid to the Fiesta Bowl, which will have the Jayhawks against West Virginia in a game of interest only to the fans in two very small states.

But that wasn’t the worst of it for the Rose Bowl that could have taken America’s Cinderella team, the unbeaten Hawaii team with a Heisman Trophy candidate and a top receiver from SoCal, Colt Brennan and Ryan Grice-Mullins, not to mention some 40 or so more California kids, in what would have been the most interesting of a boring bunch of BCS games that surely will make the TTV folks wonder why they bid alll that money for the BCS.

Memo to the Rose Bowl: If you get USC–Ohio State, then sticking with the historic and geographic tradition of the Big Ten and Pac-10 is worth it.

Get Illinois-USC and you’d have been far better off looking for someone else. Or if you get the “Cheese-head” fans doing “The Beer Barrell Polka” or the farmers from Iowa or those people with the funny accents from Minnesota or Joe Pa’s boys or the historic traditions and tremendous fan bases of Ohio State and Michigan. Hey, even Northwestern’s once-every-half-century visit can be of interest.

But Illinois? Sorry, Red Grange doesn’t run there any more.