It’s shaping up as a breakthrough season for the Pacific 10 Conference, only three USC victories and a decimal-point bake-off from earning its first bowl championship series title-game appearance.

Finally, the Pac-10 appears to have done what is necessary to push a team to the top.

Foremost, the conference has become thoroughly mediocre — call it USC and the Nine Pylons.

Any student of BCS warfare knows a key to garnering a national title spot is having a great team dominate a weak conference.

It’s the reason the two worst BCS leagues, the Atlantic Coast (Florida State) and Big East (Miami, Virginia Tech) conferences, have hogged six of the 10 title-game berths.

The Pac-10 this year has become the perfect storm, a confluence of rising USC air against an emerging weak front.

The Pac-10 is so lousy:
¢ Only two teams, USC and Washington State, are ranked in the Associated Press top 25.

• Washington State, the biggest threat to USC, spit the bit in last week’s loss at the Coliseum.
• Utah, of the Mountain West, is the only school unbeaten in Pac-10 play (2-0).
• Should USC advance to the Sugar Bowl, the conference may not have a second-place team that is BCS eligible.
• UCLA, incredibly tied for the conference lead, boasts an offense so horrid it should come with a viewer discretion warning.
• Stanford, which defeated UCLA, lost to Oregon, 35-0.
• Oregon, the conference’s flagship team since 1996 or so, is 5-4 after a 4-0 start and might not even make a bowl.

What happened to the Pac-10?

For one, the big guns are shooting blanks. In a year that was going to be down for quarterbacks no matter what, Washington’s Cody Pickett and Arizona State’s Andrew Walter have struggled after fantastic 2002 seasons.

This always has been a quarterback-driven conference, yet this year — USC’s Matt Leinart being the exception — the position has taken a collective backpedal.

Washington and Arizona State were supposed to be the two biggest threats to USC this year. Southern Cal defeated both teams by 20 points.

Washington is 5-4, while Arizona State is 4-5 after last week’s 51-23 loss to California.

Should USC fall short in the BCS this year, fear not, because the Trojans figure to be even better next year.

And the Pac-10 figures to be even worse.