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Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if it's ridiculous that teams and conferences are evaluated by bowl game performances because they are. Rewind to week one, how many times did we hear "Michigan is coming off an 11 win season with a BCS bowl win" whenever the media personalities were explaining their #8 pre-season ranking. Bowl performance has a large effect on pre-season rankings, which helps shape the perception of who the best teams are and which conferences are the strongest.
As far as the rest of the Pac-12 being awful, the top of the conference tends to be what caries the most weight (look at the SEC), so Stanford and Oregon winning while Oklahoma and K-State were taken to the woodshed will probably have an effect on what the pollsters think.
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