I’m happy to report that I was wrong and, thanks to the power of the internet, I was corrected in record time. I doubt The Smoking Gun has ever solved anything this complex, this fast.

A few hours ago I posted about the possible scenarios that would take USC to the BCS National Championship game and calculated that the Trojans could only make it in 0.24% of the possible outcomes. The scenarios were correct. The math? Not so much. Turns out that in a land of hypotheticals and coin flips, USC has better than a 50% shot.

Several of you smelled something fishy. Fortunately, a USC graduate student named Anthony Christodoulou cleared the air. When in doubt, email an engineer!

"There are really only 8 games of any importance that are out of SC’s
control, not 11," explained Anthony. Why? "The Big 12 championship is one game, not three (it doesn’t matter who plays in it) and you said yourself that Alabama/Auburn doesn’t matter. That means you have 2^8 = 256 possible outcomes."

That’s a big step down from the 2,048 I suggested. I also neglected the fact that slipping ahead of either the SEC or Big 12
champ would render the scenarios in the other conference irrelevant, since USC would already be in the title game.

He broke it down in several tables (they don’t fit here, but email me if you want them) and explained what the odds really look like from a mathematical perspective, assuming USC leaps any two-loss team:

"131 outcomes of 256 games actually result in a USC appearance the
championship … In other words, if all of these teams were evenly
matched, USC would be most likely in. Nobody thinks Baylor, Texas
A&M, The Citadel, Missouri, or FSU are nearly evenly matched with
their opponents, of course, so if you give each of those 5 teams a 25%
chance to win (Mizzou probably has more, but the rest of the teams
probably have less), and estimate that the other 3 games are evenly
matched, the probability drops to about 28%."

All this depends on USC running the table against arch rivals Notre Dame and UCLA, and Anthony pointed out that 25% might be generous odds for some of the underdogs. Before you rush off to Vegas, remember that 64 of the 131 scenarios depend on Florida losing to The Citadel (a Division 2 school with a 4-7 record) for the
first time in history and 30 depend on Baylor beating Texas Tech (which last happened in 1995).

One more caveat: five of the outcomes that place USC in the title game depend on the Trojans winning a popularity contest in the BCS end-of-days scenario. That’s where voters would have to chose between an 11-1 USC team, an 11-2 Big 12 champion Mizzou, and a pair of 11-1 Big 12 teams that were shut out of the conference championship game. As explained in this post, USC isn’t getting enough style points for that.

The final 32 scenarios depend on Florida State upsetting Florida, then a two-loss Florida upsetting Alabama. Even that could lead to some voter turmoil.

Thanks again to Anthony, who gets the final word: "Fight on Florida, fight on Mizzou!"

— Adam Rose