The scope of the split, if OK'd by shareholders, would be unprecedented for an American blue chip company in modern times.

To get its stock, now at 68 cents, up to the $15 to $25 range it seeks, Lucent would need a reverse split of 1-for-30 or more, shrinking shares out by 96%. That would cut the number from 3.43 billion now to about 120 million.

The move could serve two important purposes. A higher stock price might reassure current and potential customers who fear the company may not survive.

Second, if Lucent were booted from the S&P 500, managers of indexed portfolios would have to dump the shares, putting more pressure on a stock that's already lost nearly 98% of its value.

"They've got lot bigger things to worry about than staying on the NYSE," said Steve Kamman, a CIBC World Markets analyst. "When your stock is trading under $1 and your market cap's falling, remaining on the S&P 500 is the bigger fish you've got to worry about frying."

Nobody knows if Lucent or other former highfliers of the tech bubble are about to get dumped from the S&P 500.

The keepers of the widely followed index make add/delete decisions behind closed doors via a seven-member committee.

That process makes it stand out from other more passively managed indexes. In most cases, indexes ax firms solely based on a pre-defined set list of criteria.

"When you put humans into the process of picking an index," said Don Townswick, portfolio manager for ING Aeltus Investment Management, "it puts emotion and an element of discretion into the process."

As a result, he says, the S&P's U.S. index committee "tends to fall for the latest and greatest stock regardless of how it got to that point."

Townswick manages an ING fund with $4 billion in assets that uses the S&P 500 as its benchmark. Like many other money managers, he looks at the S&P 500 with a hefty grain of salt.

"One of the reasons why the S&P 500 is a difficult benchmark to meet is that there's such a concentration of a very few big companies," said Townswick. "A lot of managers don't stick with the S&P's weighting because sooner or later its concentration just becomes too small."

For instance, 10 stocks now make up almost 25% of its total market value. Too many of the rest, say critics, are low-priced laggards like Lucent. According to Morningstar, 31 stocks on the S&P 500 traded below 5 as of Friday. Some 67 were priced less than 10 and 165 issues traded less than 20.

Most are connected to tech or telecom. Utilities also have a big presence at the bottom.

"The S&P 500 tracks the market," said David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P's U.S. index committee. "The market along with everyone else got caught up in the tech bubble. So, yes, the S&P 500 did get caught up in it."

Members of the selection committee, he says, can't get a break either way. "There was a period in late 1999 and early 2000 when the overall market actually had a greater concentration of tech stocks than the 500 index did," said Blitzer. "So we were actually heroes."

Alan Newman, editor of the investment newsletter Crosscurrents, says the selection committee shouldn't be let off the hook so fast.

"They made conscious decisions as active money managers at the peak of the dot-com mania to include stocks with no real earnings. Even worse, they substituted stocks that were paying dividends with ones that didn't."

Other major indexes did much the same. But the S&P 500's narrow focus and lack of clear buy-and-sell signals, says Newman, stood out.

Those factors, he and others say, forced mutual fund and pension managers benchmarking the S&P 500 to create a pricing bubble much more pronounced than found in the actual market.

"For this reason, pension consultants and others should never have adopted the S&P 500 index as a benchmark in evaluating the performance of their fund managers," said Horace "Woody" Brock, president of corporate investment adviser Strategic Economic Decisions.

"When the tech bubble burst, the S&P 500 index fell much more than any valid index of the entire U.S. economy did," he said.

Blitzer argues that's not the case. In fact, comparing average S&P 500 returns to those of the Russell 1000 shows similar results short term and through 15 years.

Some market trackers predict that won't last much longer. They'd like to see more of the S&P 500's "dead wood" removed. Chief on their wish list to be cut are tech stocks like Lucent.

"The S&P shot itself in the head by trying to compete with the Nasdaq," said Newman. "It's not something they're going to be able to recover from. It's going to go the way of the so-called new economy."

Blitzer says such criticism misses the point. He points out that due to its concentration, it's difficult to change the index's overall weightings. "People are frustrated with their investments right now," said Blitzer. "We understand that. But don't shoot the messenger."