An interesting quirk that I just noticed. Had the Rose selected Georgia and the Sugar exercised their right to block that the Rose could then have picked #12 Florida and the Sugar would have had to block that selection as well, which they would have had the right to do, if they wanted Georgia. For had they not done so, then they would have lost the ability to pick #5 Georgia as two SEC teams would occupy BCS slots before they even picked a team!
So if the Sugar had decided that they wanted Georgia they had the power to definitely get them and Florida really wasn't even eligible for a BCS selection.
So the Rose Bowl's selection thought process could have been:
#5 Georgia -- blocked by Sugar,
#6 Missouri -- unattractive for whatever reason, perhaps a Big 12 school from Midwest may not bring big fan following to CA (although that wasn't true when OU played a few years ago) and we're not convinced that this team is very good anyway after playing in a rather down Big 12
#8 Kansas -- same as Missouri
#9 West Virginia -- Big East champ may not bring fans across country and we don't trust the quality of this conference yet
#10 Hawaii -- small fan base may not fill Rose bowl stadium and perhaps not a good enough team to face USC as they play in a nonmajor conference
#11 Arizona State -- not wanted due to also being in the PAC-10 with already committed USC and didn't give USC a competitive game in conference play a few weeks ago
#12 Florida -- blocked by Sugar
#13 Illinois -- even though may not be a really quality team, let's go for the Big Ten/Pac10 thing, that will bring in the fans and uphold our tradition and that's more important to us than taking a higher rated and possibly better team. The contest probably won't be that much worse than either Big 12 team or the Big East champ could provide.