With reenergized tailback Stafon Johnson showing the way, No. 1 USC ran all over Nebraska, boosting the Pac-10's claim that it's as tough as the SEC

Johnson averaged 13.1 yards a carry as the Trojans piled up 313 rushing yards. Peter Read Miller/SI

BCS Conference Call The Pac-10 may be closing the gap, but from top to bottom the SEC can't be beat. And, oh, how the Big Ten has fallen SEC: Kathy Miles recently presented her husband, Les, with a gag gift -- a hat that says pac-10 rules . Not quite. After last weekend -- Kentucky knocked off No. 9 Louisville, Florida hung 59 points on Tennessee, and LSU blanked Middle Tennessee 44-0 (the same Blue Raiders squad that gave Louisville all it could handle) -- the SEC rules. PAC-10: With marquee wins over the SEC (Cal 45, Tennessee 31), Big Ten (Oregon 39, Michigan 7) and Big 12 (USC 49, Nebraska 31), the so-called finesse league is clearly on the rise. Three weekend losses -- Washington to Ohio State, UCLA to Utah, Arizona to New Mexico -- undermined the claim on Miles's new hat. BIG EAST: Even with Louisville's defeat by Kentucky, this arriviste conference had three very strong weeks. West Virginia is a bona fide national title contender. Rutgers' worst enemy is its student section. With an OT win at Auburn, South Florida owns the league's most impressive victory. BIG 12: With five ranked teams, it's not fair to call it Oklahoma and the 11 Dwarfs, but none of the others are in the Sooners' class. Texas isn't as good as its No. 7 ranking. Nebraska was exposed by USC. Texas A&M was lucky to beat Fresno State in OT. Missouri scores points in bunches but has serious issues on defense. ACC: Virginia Tech was flat-out embarrassed at LSU. Nor did Miami, in losing by 38 at Oklahoma, do the ACC any favors. Tom O'Brien kicked off his N.C. State tenure with a loss to Central Florida. Silver lining: Boston College's 24-10 win at Georgia Tech, driven by Matt Ryan's 435 passing yards, was one of the week's best showings. BIG TEN: Michigan finally got over its Carr-sickness, plucking the wings off helpless Notre Dame. Bad news: That modest uptick was offset by humiliations galore: Iowa lost at Iowa State, Minnesota at Florida Atlantic, and Northwestern to Duke, snapping at 22 games the nation's longest losing streak.

By Austin Murphy

He has long gone against the grain in this staid, often self-important profession, so it wasn't overly surprising to see Pete Carroll playing with an action figure in the visitors' locker room at Nebraska last Saturday.

The USC coach would argue that he wasn't playing with the five-inch facsimile of Jack Bauer so much as he was holding it at arm's length, examining it, admiring it. The toy was a gift from Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Bauer, that bane of international terrorists, in the hit series 24 .

Saturday may have been Carroll's birthday -- he turned 56 -- but it was the coach who bestowed a more profound gift on his offensive linemen: He gave them the chance to take over the game.

Six minutes into the second quarter at Lincoln's Memorial Stadium, the question was not whether the Trojans were the top-ranked team in the nation; it was whether they were the best team on the field. They trailed by 10-7 to a Nebraska team that was taking it to them physically. Clubbed in the larynx on a kickoff return, Vincent Joseph had left the field on a gurney. (He turned out to be fine.) During the extended stoppage of play Carroll gathered his offensive linemen around him.

"He told us, 'You know what? We're not gonna throw any passes,' " recalls right tackle Drew Radovich. "We're gonna run the ball until we score."

"Let's knock 'em off the football and go have some fun," is how Carroll remembers putting it.

Five running plays and 45 yards later, USC had a 14-10 lead. On their next possession the Trojans covered 73 yards in nine plays -- 60 of those yards coming on the ground, through the sort of vast, yawning holes that Cornhuskers backs by the name of Mike Rozier and Ahman Green once dashed on this field. Southern California scored touchdowns on five straight possessions to take a 42-10 lead, serving notice, in the process, that:

1. Nebraska, which under fourth-year coach Bill Callahan has taken baby steps in the direction of its former glory, still has a long way to go.

2. USC's ineptitude in the running game last season was an anomaly. The Trojans were limited by a raft of injuries at fullback and, it would appear, by the seasonlong presence in Carroll's doghouse of the team's best back.

When the game ended -- the final was 49-31, the Cornhuskers having punched in two late scores against USC's second-string D -- the Trojans had outrushed the home team 313 yards to 31. USC unveiled what Carroll described as "some cool misdirection plays" in which wide receivers motioned in one direction and the ballcarrier took the handoff going in the other. That deception "created some hesitation in their linebacker play," according to offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian, "that allowed our linemen to get up on 'em and drive 'em down the field."

The end result: sportswriters scrambling to find synonyms for gaping hole .

Wide gulfs. Yawning breaches. Vast chasms. The Trojans hogs -- including true freshman center Kris O'Dowd -- created some of each. "I've been around here awhile," senior left tackle Sam Baker said on the field after the game. "It's not too often [that Carroll] puts the game on our shoulders. It gets you fired up."

Why?

"Because you can't really make a statement pass blocking. You make a statement running the ball, pushing guys out of the way."

Speaking of statements, USC made an emphatic one on behalf of its conference. As the window closes (for the most part) on interconference play, it's time for final arguments in one of this sport's perennial bar-stool debates: Which conference is strongest? While that question remained open going into last weekend, a series of outrageous events in Lexington, Ky., swung the balance in favor of the SEC. With a last-minute, 57-yard touchdown pass from Andre Woodson to Steve Johnson, Kentucky knocked off ninth-ranked Louisville 40-34. That victory spoke to the depth of the SEC, which, come Sunday, had six teams in the AP's Top 25 poll.

The contentiousness of the Whose Conference Is Strongest debate was ratcheted up over the summer by LSU coach Les Miles, whose intemperate remarks to a booster club quickly made their way onto the Internet and around the college football world. Speaking of the Trojans, Miles said dismissively, "They're going to play real knock-down-drag-outs with UCLA and Washington, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford -- some real juggernauts... I would like that path for us."

As the season got under way, it became clear that the Pac-10, long derided as a confederacy of finesse offenses and meringue defenses, was nothing of the sort.

SteveJohnson gave Kentucky and the SEC a marquee win with a last-minute TD against Louisville. James Crisp/AP

Ask Derek Dooley, now in his first year as coach of Louisiana Tech, a 42-12 loser to Cal on Saturday. The son of former Georgia coach Vince Dooley, Derek grew up on the sideline at Bulldogs games. After walking on at Virginia as a wideout, he spent five years as an assistant at LSU under Nick Saban.

"When you grow up in the South and coach in the SEC," says Dooley, you are steeped in "a culture of physical play, of toughness. You also have a perception of the kind of football that's played on the West Coast." It's no surprise, then, that before he began watching tape of Cal last week, Dooley had a preconceived notion of Pac-10 football. How long did it take him to open his mind?

"I watched three plays, and I thought, I'm seeing what I grew up with," recalls Dooley. "These guys are physical, they force you to defend the run, then hit you with the long pass -- the plays you see on SportsCenter ."

The 42 points the Bears scored on Dooley's Bulldogs were three fewer than Cal hung on visiting Tennessee on the first Saturday of the season. With Miles's remarks as a subplot -- and with a plane circling the stadium pregame, pulling a banner that read, sec rules, pac-10 drools -- the Bears outran and outhit the 15th-ranked Vols in a 45-31 victory.

If out-of-conference foes want to think that "we play a soft brand of football," says Bears linebacker Zack Follett, "let 'em think it. Texas A&M thought that, and we outhit them, snap to whistle" in a 45-10 domination in the Holiday Bowl last December.

Besides, adjectives like physical and smashmouth can be euphemisms for primitive and unimaginative . Until Steve Spurrier took over at Florida in 1990, the SEC was a notorious coldbed of offensive innovation. While the league's passing attacks are far more sophisticated now than they were even a few years ago, one Pac-10 coach still described the SEC last August as "a dead conference that way, the worst offensive conference in history."

During the Bears' preparation for Tennessee, Follett described the Vols' offense as "basic stuff. If you compare them to the offenses that we go against -- 'SC, Washington, Oregon State -- we definitely have a lot more film study to prepare for those teams."

It didn't matter how much time Michigan spent breaking down film of Oregon's spread-option offense. The Wolverines were powerless to stop senior quarterback Dennis Dixon from eviscerating their defense in a 39-7 win in the Big House on Sept. 8.

On that day the Pac-10 was 7-0 against nonconference foes -- its first perfect Saturday in nine years. Going into last weekend, the Pac-10 was 13-3 against nonleague competition. True, it lost a bit of luster with No. 11 UCLA's baffling 44-6 loss at Utah and Washington's 33-14, return-to-earth defeat at the hands of Ohio State. The Trojans picked up the Pac-10 by subjecting Nebraska to the sort of punishment the Big Red meted out, once upon a time, on a regular basis.

Perhaps most noteworthy in the victory was that a feature runner appeared to have emerged for the tailback-rich Trojans. Sophomore Stafon Johnson, who starred at L.A.'s Dorsey High, plunged down the depth chart in '06. "I was killin' it in the scrimmages," he told SI last week, "but when it came to practices, I was doing just enough to make the play go."

He didn't hustle, failed to finish plays, had no fire in his belly. "He got beaten out," says Carroll. "We tried to make it really clear what we were looking for, and it wasn't making sense to him for some reason. We knew he was a really good player. We just weren't getting it out of him." The recollection brings a tinge of exasperation to Carroll's voice.

How far down the depth chart was Johnson? "I was basically at the bottom of the Grand Canyon," he says. "The light went on for me over the winter. My grandfather passed" -- Larry (Big Dad) Mallory died of a heart attack at age 66 -- "and it felt like it was time to grow up and be a man."

Johnson tore it up in the spring but still went into fall camp seventh on the depth chart. His attitude adjustment combined with attrition at tailback -- Emmanuel Moody transferred to Florida; C.J. Gable, Chauncey Washington, Allen Bradford and Joe McKnight all incurred nagging injuries -- ensured that Johnson would get plenty of work in Nebraska. He finished with 144 yards on 11 carries for a preposterous 13.1-yard average that nevertheless seemed slightly anemic beside the per-carry numbers of Gable (four carries, 69 yards, 17.2 yards per rush) and fullback Stanley Havili (two, 52, 26.0).

If Trojans offensive line coach Pat Ruel seemed even more gregarious than usual in victory, he had his reasons. "Oh, yeah," Ruel said with a smile. "I got my ass kicked in here quite often." It turned out he'd spent nine years as an assistant at Kansas. "I've been in here four or five times when Tom Osborne was the [Cornhuskers'] coach, and wow, the game couldn't get over fast enough."

Ruel and the other USC assistants had gathered a few hours before the game. Having created some pretext to get Carroll into a meeting room, they popped in a DVD of uncertain provenance. On the screen appeared Sutherland's Jack Bauer, who interrupted a scene by turning to the camera and saying, "Happy birthday, Pete."

An hour after the game, Carroll sat on a stool, still holding that action figure, but talking now about the return of USC's running game, the gift that keeps on giving.