Rather than the usual parody, I thought it might be interesting to kick off Pac Ten Week with a look at the actual state of the conference under merciless Trojan rule. 2003 was USC's first outright conference title under Pete Carroll and the freshman campaign of this fall's fifth-year seniors (well, except Herschel Dennis):

The initial goal of this post was to ask whether anyone had a shot at catching USC, but that's a boring exercise on a direct path to hyperbole (the answer, of course, is a decisive no: aside from the routine three-touchdown beatings and the outrageous advantage in the crucial right hand column above, the Trojans have finished #1, #1, #2 and #4 in the AP poll in the relevant seasons and return more game experience than in any of Carroll's first six years). Southern Cal is the king and will remain the king, hail, hail, etc.

But the parity through the middle of the league is more interesting: Oregon, UCLA, Arizona State, Oregon State and even Washington State, so indistinguishable to the rest of the country, really are indistinguishable year to year, so much so that the "average" conference game for each is decided by a field goal or less.

Everybody gets a turn.
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This is generally credited to the addition of a ninth conference game when the other power conferences are scrambling to take on I-AA fodder (only Arizona is dipping into the lower division in the Pac Ten this year, to play Northern Arizona), but those results don't begin to hold up according to opponents' win percentage, where the SEC rules without peer.

But consider that the Pac Ten hasn't put a second team in the BCS since 2002, evidence in itself of consistent intra-league sniping, and in that five-year span has sent four different runners-up to the Holiday Bowl, six different third place teams in six years to the Sun Bowl, four different programs in five years to the Las Vegas Bowl, etc. The class divisions beneath the king are too fluid for that.

Hence: no coup, no revolution. Just fighting for what you can get.