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By Rick Eymer
Palo Alto Online Sports Staff

Interviewer to Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck: "What does it mean to lead the conference in pass efficiency?"

Luck: "I didn't know I was until just now."

Interviewer: "Now you know. What can you say?"

Luck: "Cool."

Different Interviewer: "Do you even know what the formula is for that?"

Luck: "I have no idea. I do know interceptions are bad and touchdowns are good."

Yeah, so simple even cavemen can, well, you know the rest.

The NCAA developed the formula in 1979 so that a rating of 100.00 would be considered average, or, in golf terminology, par for the course.

Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh has been talking about Luck's "efficiency" in running the team in positive terms all year. Harbaugh referred to his game management skills, but he could also mean Luck's decision-making in the heat of the moment.

Luck, a redshirt freshman who's father played a handful of seasons in the NFL as a quarterback, doesn't have the most touchdown passes or fewest interceptions. He doesn't have the most passing yardage or even the best completion percentage.

Luck, however, does the most with his opportunities and does so at a rate nearly 50 percent better than the average quarterback. In the Pac-10, only Washington State's signal caller has an efficiency rating lower than 100.

The NCAA formula is far less complex than the NFL formula, which assigns different ratios and weighs one stat more than another. At the college level, four statistics are taken into consideration: completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdowns and interceptions.

Each stat is assigned a value that equates to the average, based on statistics gathered between 1965 and 1978.

For the completion percentage that value is 100, for yards per attempt the value is 8.4, touchdowns is 330 and interceptions is a minus-200.

Most of us can tell the difference between throwing for touchdowns and avoiding interceptions. The rest of the formula is better left to guys like Stanford senior running back Toby Gerhart, who worked out a calculus problem set while watching Oregon's 47-20 Pac-10 victory over USC last weekend.

We can do the math, but this assigned value thing is a struggle. This journalist failed high school geometry but did quite well, thank you, in basic statistics. Of course, that was just a smidgen before 1979, when it was cool just to win and formulas were left to race cars.

For comparison sake, Hawaii's Colt Brennan holds the NCAA single-season record at 186.0 in 2006.

Boise State's Kellen Moore is the current college leader with a 171.02 rating. Luck ranks 16th overall, still in elite company.

Numbers can mean everything, or they can mean the opposite of everything. You're free to insert your own variables on the subject matter.

Stanford had the weekend free to do what young men do on weekends these days. For most of the members of the football team, that meant watching the game between the Ducks and Trojans, and I'm desperately trying to avoid some reference to the Ducks sticking it to them as an innuendo.

"They exposed USC a little bit," said Gerhart, who grew up in Southern California but never really gave the Trojans much love. "That's more of a testament to Oregon's offense and how efficient it is."

The conference-leading Ducks will be at Stanford on Saturday for a 12:41 p.m. scheduled kickoff. The Cardinal goes to USC the following Saturday for a 12:30-ish p.m. kickoff.