Dallas ? The good news for top-ranked Miami is that it awakened in time to rally from a fourth-quarter deficit to a 42-17 victory at Rutgers on Saturday.

But that still might not have been enough to preserve the Hurricanes’ No. 2 position in the BCS rankings had they not had a little help from their Big East buddies in Boston.

No. 3 Notre Dame, which navigated a minefield at Florida State a week ago, slipped on a banana peel in its own kitchen.

Boston College beat the Fighting Irish, 14-7, in South Bend, Ind., yanking the Irish from the short list of undefeated teams in the national championship hunt.

Notre Dame (8-1) might have usurped the Hurricanes in the BCS standings, which will be released Monday and appear in Tuesday’s editions of The Dallas Morning News, with a victory over the Eagles.

The two top teams in the BCS at the end of the season will meet in the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., for the BCS national championship Jan. 3.

Thanks to a change in the BCS formula this season, the Hurricanes won’t suffer in computer ratings for their dreary performance. The conference commissioners in charge of the system required their seven computer programmers to remove components that include margin of victory.

In this case, however, that won’t help Miami. The Hurricanes have been buoyed in the BCS by their No. 1 rankings in the two major polls, not the computers. The computers had already punished Miami for not playing as difficult a schedule as Notre Dame and Oklahoma.

Now the humans voting in the AP and coaches polls must consider the three-quarter struggle Miami had with Rutgers which hasn’t won a Big East Conference game since 1999 in their voting. Both polls are announced Sunday.

Miami’s victory serves as an example of the flaw in the argument of the anti-playoff establishment, which has argued that no playoff is needed because with the BCS, each week of the regular season is sort of a playoff.

But any system in which a winning team can suffer is not nothing like a playoff.

So entering the final five weeks of the regular season, a handful of teams remain undefeated. What’s interesting is that they’re all from different conferences and will not face one another.

That presents the possibility for a logjam of teams with similar records in line for one of the two Fiesta Bowl slots.

Oklahoma and Miami probably will maintain the top two BCS positions.

The Sooners only strengthened their hold on the top spot with their 27-11 whipping of Colorado. They can probably expect to pick up votes in the AP poll, where they are ranked second.

But No. 3 Notre Dame will slide down toward the No. 7 and 8 spots held by Texas and Washington State.