You already know full well why Auburn is a 5½-point favorite to finish off a 13-0 season Saturday against South Carolina: Cam Newton, Nick Fairley, Cam Newton, the fact that Carolina is are arguably the least intimidating representative the SEC East has ever sent into the conference championship game – an event that's featured exactly one notable upset (upstart LSU over Tennessee in 2001) in its 18-year existence – and, oh yes, Cam Newton. As the Gamecocks are the only thing standing between the Tigers' ascension to the BCS Championship Game and utter chaos, though, it's worth examining their prospects as 2010's last, best hope for throwing a wrench into the BCS' gears:
• They almost did it the first time. In September, Carolina led 27-21 going into the fourth quarter at Auburn, and blew the lead after a) Back-to-back fumbles by quarterback Stephen Garcia to set Auburn up in good field position for a pair of go-ahead touchdowns, and b) Bizarrely benching Garcia down the stretch for true freshman Connor Shaw, who hadn't played in the first three quarters and was predictably picked off on both of the Gamecocks' late drives for a tying touchdown.
• Auburn still can't defend top receivers. Alshon Jeffery launched his All-America campaign in the first meeting with eight catches for a career-high 192 yards and two touchdowns. Three weeks later, Arkansas' Greg Childs burned Auburn for his career-high, 164 yards, with two touchdowns on nine catches. A week after that, LSU's Reuben Randle answered Cam Newton's celebrated touchdown run with a 39-yard catch-and-run that knotted the game at 17-17 in the fourth quarter, one of Randle's six catches for 73 yards. Georgia's A.J. Green matched Childs' stat line against the Tigers with nine catches for a career-high 164 yards and two touchdowns of his own. Julio Jones added to the party last week with 199 yards on 10 grabs, including an uncontested touchdown. Through 12 games, there's nothing at all that suggests Alshon Jeffery won't have another huge game.
• South Carolina is a more "complete" team. No one in college football this year can match Newton as a singular force of nature.But there are only a handful – Oklahoma State, Oklahoma maybe Alabama – that have matched South Carolina's "Big Three" of Garcia, Jeffery and freshman running back Marcus Lattimore, who'd be a unanimous All-American right now if his impressive list of big-game heroics had included Auburn the first time around. But the Gamecocks have also gotten a banner year from their chronically underachieving front line, which leads the SEC against the run and in getting to the passer, including a season-high seven sacks against Alabama.
• Auburn has lived a little too dangerously. On one hand, Auburn's string of comeback wins – including the win over South Carolina in September – has established it as arguably the best clutch team since Ohio State in 2002, at least. On the other hand, after dodging bullets in narrow, last-minute wins over Mississippi State, Clemson, Carolina, Kentucky and Alabama, the Tigers are just about due for their hour glass to run out.
• What are the odds any of this will actually matter? Better than the odds were that Nebraska would knock off Texas when we were asking the same questions about the Cornhuskers' bid to throw the system into a tailspin at this time last year, and much better than Oregon State's chances of upsetting Oregon. Nine teams in the 13-year BCS era have blown certain national championship bids on the final Saturday of the season, three of them with perfect records and all but one of them (No. 1 Missouri, against Oklahoma in the 2007 Big 12 Championship Game) as a more substantial favorite going in than Auburn is in the Georgia Dome. There's a reason it's an upset – Auburn has clearly been the superior team over the course of the season – but far stranger things have happened.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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