Sports

GOTTA MAKE USC NO. 1 (FOR MOST SHOCKING ‘L’)

MEMO to LSU: Don’t overlook Kentucky next week.

Memo to Cal: Don’t overlook Oregon State.

Memo to South Florida: Don’t overlook Connecticut – well, at least not completely.

In the season of the upset, none, not even Appalachian State’s shocker over Michigan, tops Stanford’s 24-23 win over USC on Saturday night, for three reasons.

1. Stanford was coming off a 1-11 season and has a new coaching staff led by Jim Harbaugh, who irked USC coach Pete Carroll in the summer by saying this would be Carroll’s last season in college ball.

2. The Cardinal, having been outscored 141-51 in its first three Pac 10 losses, was forced to start at quarterback Tavita Pritchard, a redshirt sophomore who had one career completion, because starter T.C. Ostrander suffered a seizure during the week and was being evaluated.

3. Before Pritchard tossed a game-winning 10-yard touchdown pass with 49 seconds left, he had to convert a fourth-and-20 without being able to communicate with the coaching staff because of crowd noise. He hit Richard Sherman for 20.

“I think it was similar if I heard him right,” Pritchard said of the play he called. “I saw the coverage I wanted and Sherm came through.”

As for the other top upsets of the season:

No. 2 was Syracuse winning 38-35 at Louisville. Don’t care if these selfish Cardinals are playing for their own draft status and not the classy Steve Kragthorpe. The Orange had been outscored 118-32 in three games before the win, and have been outscored 72-28 since.

No. 3 is Appalachian State over Michigan simply because of the discrepancy in scholarship players. The Mountaineers, after all, are the two-time defending Playoff Subdivision champs. And it was the opener, when teams are ripe for an upset.

The No. 4 upset goes to Florida Atlantic for its 42-39 win over Minnesota, which, when we last checked, was in the process of becoming the first Big Ten team since 1960 to build a new stadium. It’s not as if the Owls used trick plays and kick returns. They gained 580 yards against the Gophers.

And the No. 5 most significant upset? Well, let’s see what happens this weekend.

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Kansas is off to a 5-0 start after a 30-24 win at Kansas State, and there’s a method to coach Mark Mangino’s madness.

After going 6-6 last season, Mangino split his team into eight squads, each of which wore different colored T-shirts. The squads competed for points, getting credit for good grades in summer school, doing community work and supporting Olympic sports.

“If you want to be a team, you have to be a team all year long, not just during the football season,” Mangino told The Post. “The guys have bought into that.”

lenn.robbins@nypost.com