Jackson Free Press

The few of us still in the practice of keeping straight the interchangeable Meineke Car Cares and Micron PCs of the ever-inflating college football bowl season—postseason rewards for the game's "elite" clique of (mostly) winners for the second straight year is bestowed upon more "major" programs (64) than not (55)—have at least been able to rely on a game's timing as a rough gauge of its prestige, with the important games coming after Christmas. These days, the Bowl Championship Series has pushed back the cutoff for the supposed creme de la creme up to a week into the new year to avoid overlap, culminating in its self-proclaimed National Championship Game.

Not even the uninitiated, though, are likely to confuse Southern Miss' Jan. 7 date with Ohio University (that's the Bobcats, runners-up of the Mid-American Conference, not the top-ranked Buckeyes of Ohio State) as anything but a rather halfhearted commercial for title-sponsor GMAC. The game, known for a few years as the Mobile Alabama Bowl, comes later than every other bowl game but the BCS championship game.

Southern Miss fans, who have been to nearly all the regular postseason stops for Conference USA also-rans—except Hawaii—could be expected to show some pride in the program's consistency. Whether or not it's plateaued, this is a program that's kept its head just enough above the water. But the GMAC Bowl is bush league, and USM doesn't have to settle season after season for bush league. USM's fans know this because, five days before USM takes the field to great mockery in what few living rooms outside Mississippi and Ohio will bother to watch its old Conference USA rival Louisville will be Orange Bowlin' it up in Miami for a glitzy, traditionally weighty BCS showcase with a $15.5 million payout against unlikely—and likely overwhelmed—Atlantic Coast Conference champ Wake Forest. A little more than six years ago, people would have mocked the suggestion that it would be Louisville, rather than USM, that would first shatter the BCS' glass ceiling.

In early November 2000, Southern Miss was en route to a breakthrough on the national stage. When a 5-3 Cardinal team came to Hattiesburg on Nov. 4, it was a mere speed bump in the Eagles' drive to a second consecutive conference championship, potentially unprecedented postseason rewards and, if everything fell in place, the school's first-ever finish in the national top 10, a position USM held only once at any point in any season, for a single week in 1982, before unexpectedly losing to—yes—Louisville.

Ranked as high as 11th following six straight wins, Southern Miss had amassed a 14-game conference winning streak and a stunning overall record of 24-2 against the rest of Conference USA in the league's 4-1/2-year existence, winning a share of the 1996 title and outright championships in 1997 and the previous season, 1999, both followed by convincing Liberty Bowl victories and top-15 poll finishes. USM expected to add the Cardinals as a homecoming footnote in its ongoing chronicle of Southern dominance.

Those tables, as you may have surmised, were decisively turned by Louisville that afternoon, though the long-term consequences are evident only in hindsight. The Eagles lost two more of their final three league games that season and 15 more over the next six years. They conceded a second championship to Louisville in 2001 and watched it leave for the lucrative siren call of the Big East, on the heels of the most thoroughly dominating performance in C-USA history in 2004.

Five years on, Louisville's ascension—though slowed briefly in 2002 and 2003, pre-Petrino—hasn't slowed. Through its string of record-breaking quarterbacks and ongoing success against steadily increasing schedule strength, its niche among the country's top schools grows more defined, victory by victory. A successful performance in the Orange Bowl could win the Cardinals a ranking as high in the year-end polls as number two.

Considering that Louisville has won 30 games in three years and finally notched the much sought-after "quality win" last month against fellow newly minted Big East heavy West Virginia, no one in football's chattering punditocracy should be surprised that they stand on the doorstep of the national championship. If not for a second-chance field goal that ended the Cardinals' only bad half all season in a three-point defeat at Rutgers, it would by all reasonable guesses be Louisville, rather than SEC winner Florida, preparing for the championship mash-up with Ohio State in two weeks.

And Southern Miss—well, Southern Miss meanwhile is prepping for New Year's in Mobile, where it will collect the NCAA-mandated minimum $750,000, before expenses. The Liberty Bowl, a December game USM has managed to reach once in the last seven years, remains its highest postseason achievement.