With just a week left in the college football season and the Stanford football team’s season over, the Cardinal must now sit and wait to find out where it will be playing in a bowl this January — and thanks to its second consecutive 11-1 finish, Stanford will be playing for its second consecutive BCS bowl.

 
But every college football fan knows that there are few things more confusing than the BCS — nuclear physics, the “plot” of the three Star Wars prequels and the Kennedy assassination are perhaps the only subjects more baffling — so it’s useful to lay out the scenarios that affect Stanford’s road ahead.

In order to put the BCS puzzle together, it’s useful to lay out the teams that are still in contention. For clarity’s sake, it’ll be easiest to go conference by conference and pick out who still has a chance.

Pac-12: Oregon and UCLA play tonight in Eugene to decide the Pac-12 champion, who will go to the Rose Bowl. Even the staunchest Bruins fan would concede that lame-duck Rick Neuheisel’s squad doesn’t stand much of a chance, so it’s pretty safe to say that the Ducks are headed for Pasadena. Stanford is ranked fourth in the latest BCS standings, which guarantees the Cardinal a BCS berth, and it’s overwhelmingly likely that the Card will end up in the Fiesta Bowl, with an outside shot at the Sugar Bowl.

SEC: LSU and Georgia will play on Saturday to decide the conference champion — but it likely doesn’t matter if LSU wins or loses, because they’re going to the national title game either way. The Tigers’ BCS ranking is a perfect 1.000, so even if they lose to the Bulldogs, they’ll still get to reprise the “Game of the Century” with Alabama for the National Championship.

The Tide have locked up a spot in the national title game because, like Stanford, Alabama is firmly planted at number two in the standings and is extremely unlikely to move no matter what happens. It’s also worth mentioning that if Georgia does upset LSU, it will get a berth in the Sugar Bowl.

The only way the SEC race could affect Stanford is if LSU wins, because then the Sugar Bowl could select the Cardinal to play in New Orleans. However, they’re more likely to select 10-2 Michigan should that situation occur, because the Michiganders would buy up far more seats than the Cardinal ever could. (Unless Stanford decided to dedicate its $20 billion endowment to a weekend of hand grenades and bead-tossing for all students and alumni.)

Big 12: Oklahoma and Oklahoma State square off Saturday for the conference title, and the winner will end up in the Fiesta Bowl, the traditional landing spot for the Big 12 champion. So start brushing up on your Sooners and Cowboys history, Cardinal fans, if you want to get a few good laughs and learn how to taunt your future opponents.

 
Big Ten: Wisconsin and Michigan State play this Saturday to decide who goes to the Rose Bowl to face Oregon. (Or UCLA. And by that I mean Oregon.) And remember that Michigan is likely to get the call to the Sugar Bowl should LSU win.

ACC: Virginia Tech and Clemson square off in a play-in game for the Orange Bowl. How sad does that last sentence make you? Not as sad as you’re about to be.

Big East: Cincinnati, West Virginia and Louisville are the teams still in the hunt for the Orange Bowl. Because I’m sure you don’t care which of these three awful teams ends up playing the Hokies or Tigers, I won’t waste any more of your time.

 
Non-automatic-qualifying conferences: Should Houston beat Southern Mississippi on Saturday, it will win Conference USA and thus be eligible for a BCS bowl. The Cougars are likely to end up in the Sugar Bowl if they win, and if they lose, they would open up another spot for an at-large bid. If the Cougars lose and Oklahoma beats Oklahoma State, it would likely mean that both the Sooners and the Cowboys would be BCS-bound.

 
So there you have it — essentially 17 teams for 10 spots. Not that confusing at all, right? After a long, wild season, everything’s turned out to be pretty simple at the end. That’s the great thing about the BCS puzzle, after all — it says it takes two to three years on the box, but it only took me six months to figure it out.