By John Sexton

I spent a leisurely day on the couch watching college football on Dec. 4. It was Championship Saturday, and there was a ton of great games to watch, including the Civil War between Oregon and Oregon State and the SEC Championship game between South Carolina and Auburn.

I was enjoying myself immensely.

But as the day was winding down and I was watching Connecticut beat South Florida, I realized something.

This was the last day that college football would make any sense.

Because after that week, the last week of the regular season, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) takes over, and all bets are off.

The BCS rankings themselves are contrived and annoying, but the BCS bowl systems make everything worse.

Only the BCS National Championship, which pits the top two ranked teams, makes any sense. After that, the bowl games are are determined solely by what will make the most money.

The BCS has turned college football into a full-fledged business.

Most bowl spots are awarded based on which school is most likely to send more fans to the bowl’s location.

For example, it would make more sense for the BCS to put a team from Florida in the Gator Bowl, which is in Jacksonville, than to bring in a team from the Northwest.

Some bowls are obligated to take certain teams from certain conferences.

Last year, Temple, a team that had not been to a bowl since 1979, played UCLA in the Eagle Bank Bowl. UCLA had a 6-6 record last year, and Temple played in a bad conference.

No offense to Temple and UCLA, but nobody wants to see two subpar teams play in a bowl game.

We’d rather see a matchup between two good teams.

There are five BCS bowls, which are the biggest and most lucrative bowls.  Four of these bowls are solely based on automatic bids, while the other has two at large berths.

But this can make for some bad bowl games. This year, the Fiesta Bowl pits Oklahoma against UConn. Oklahoma is good, while UConn is not.

UConn is not even ranked in the top 25, yet somehow they won the Big East conference, which is collectively bad this year.

Because of the Big East’s automatic bid, fans will be treated to what will likely be a huge blowout.

In other words, not very interesting.

I won’t propose a different solution, because anything else, including a playoff, would have its problems, too. That’s a different column.

But at this point, anything is better than the money-grubbing BCS bowl system.

That said, I can’t wait for the Orange Bowl. Go Stanford!