The 1978 college football season belonged to USC and Alabama

This! This was a beautiful season of football!

For a while there, it seemed like the entire point of this series was for me to diss on 1980s football scheduling and bowl matchups. And they were bad! But 1978 was a wonderful year from a scheduling standpoint. Consider:

• USC and Alabama played in Week 3, and USC finished the regular season with Notre Dame.
• Alabama had already played Nebraska and Missouri when USC came to Birmingham.
• Notre Dame played Missouri and Michigan to start the year, then finished with USC.
• Oklahoma played Texas in non-conference, then got Missouri and Nebraska ... and then Nebraska again!
• Penn State got Ohio State early, romped over a good Maryland team in November, then faced Alabama.
• Texas, forever on the doorstep, got Oklahoma in Dallas, Arkansas at home, Houston on the road, and Maryland in El Paso.
• Nebraska got Alabama in the opener, then finished Oklahoma-Missouri-Oklahoma.
• The bowls were almost perfect! AP #1 Penn State vs. #2 Alabama, #3 USC vs. #5 Michigan, #4 Oklahoma vs. #6 Nebraska. The Big 8 rematch thing was a little weird, but still! Great!

The connectivity was high, which means the ratings have less to deduce on their own. But in the end, the AP still had to get weird and select Alabama over the USC team it lost to in Birmingham. There was an obvious case for the Tide (among other things, Alabama's loss was much better than USC's to Arizona State), and both teams were phenomenal -- a couple of steps ahead of everybody else -- but the ending was still a little bit blurry. Such was always the case pre-BCS (and often post-BCS).

Your hypothetical Playoff race

As always, here's your end-of-regular-season AP poll. How would the Playoff have shaken down?

1. Penn State (11-0)
2. Alabama (10-1)
3. USC (11-1)
4. Oklahoma (10-1)
5. Michigan (10-1)
6. Nebraska (9-2)
7. Clemson (10-1)

Assuming Nebraska's out, and assuming Penn State's in, that leaves five teams for three spots. That Alabama beat four teams that had been ranked 11th or better in AP at the time (and lost only to USC) means the Tide are almost definitely in. So then you've got USC (best win, worst loss), Oklahoma (wins over Texas and Missouri, loss to Nebraska, Big 8 runner-up), and Michigan (wins over three ranked teams, home loss to Michigan State).

I have to figure that USC is in, meaning it's OU vs. Michigan. This would have been an interesting test of the vaunted "conference title bump." Michigan State was good, but OU definitely had the better loss (by three points at NU) than Michigan (by nine points at home to MSU). UM had beaten more ranked teams but hadn't beaten anybody as good as Texas.

I think the committee follows the AP's lead here and gives the bid to OU. Nebraska's end-of-regular-season loss at home to Missouri is every bit as costly in this playoff world as it was in real life.

So we get 1 Penn State vs. 4 Oklahoma and a 2 Alabama-3 USC rematch. Or maybe it's PSU-USC and Bama-OU to avoid rematches. So then we might get USC-Oklahoma instead of Alabama's Sugar Bowl goal line stand against PSU. My first reaction: It would actually stink to lose that moment. My second reaction: Oooooooooooooh, Billy Sims vs. Charles White for the national title. I'm in.

Other thoughts:

• Missouri's 1978 season really was a stunner, memorable enough to make my book. The year started with a road win over the defending national champion, three top-five opponents (and two No. 1s) in the first four weeks, wins over Nebraska and LSU to finish up ... and injury-addled losses to Colorado and Oklahoma State in the middle.
• Northwestern: still really, really bad. Vanderbilt, too. And Boston College (just six years before Flutie's Heisman year). And Virginia. And Illinois. And WVU. All of these teams ranked below Columbia and The Citadel.
• It seems like every MAC team had a great couple of years at some point in the 1970s. The 1997-80 period was CMU's time -- they went 38-5-1, and their 1978 team lost only to Ball State ... and Alcorn State. D'oh. As mentioned previously, I'm not including lower-division or subdivision opponents in these ratings because I don't have enough information about those teams to differentiate who was and wasn't good. Alcorn State went 5-4-1 that year, and while some of their losses were to excellent teams (Grambling, Jackson State, tc.), losing to Alcorn probably meant CMU wasn't really a top-20 team. Counting that game would have tamped them down a bit. (Chattanooga, meanwhile, played a lot of lower-division teams, but their results hold up. I think they'd have still been at least top-30 or top-35 counting those.)
• SMU lost by five to Penn State, by 14 to Houston, by 19 to Texas, by three to A&M, by three to Texas Tech, and by 13 to Arkansas; meanwhile, the Mustangs tied Ohio State and beat TCU, Florida, Baylor, and Rice by a combined 109 points (granted, half of that margin came from the Rice game). They were better than their record. So, too, was Florida, which held its own against SMU, LSU, Alabama, and Georgia.

Next up: 1977 and Notre Dame's sudden (and legitimate) greatness.