After a more than a decade, college football's BCS is coming to an end. The Bowl Championship Series was founded in 1998 in order to determine college football's champion and match its top teams against each other in primetime postseason games. This year marks the final go-around for the oft-maligned system, which will be replaced with a four-team playoff starting next season.

Initially, the idea behind the BCS sounded great. Previously, there was no mechanism to guarantee that the best teams would match up against each other in their bowl games. This meant that there was frequently no clear national champion at the end of a season, as in 1994 when both Penn State and Nebraska went undefeated. However, the BCS has largely failed to deliver the uncontested results it was designed to generate.

What the BCS has generated is cash, controversy, and, to be fair, a number of memorable contests.

This year looks to be no different, as undefeated Florida State takes on 12-1 Auburn for the National Championship while five other one-loss teams from major conferences play in lesser bowls and cling to the belief that they still deserve a title shot. Among them are Alabama, whose only loss came after a fluke last-second play on the road at Auburn, and Michigan State, who defeated previously unbeaten Ohio State in the Big 10 Championship game.

Instead of filling out the playoff field as the third and fourth seeds, Michigan State is facing 11-2 Stanford in the Rose Bowl and Alabama will take on 10-2 Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl.

Unlike previous years, in which undefeated small-conference upstarts got to play BCS busters, there are no lovable underdogs in this final round of BCS match-ups. Jordan Lynch nearly led his Northern Illinois Huskies to their second straight BCS appearance, but they were upset by Ball State in the MAC championship. Instead, the other two BCS games feature 11-1 Baylor against 11-1 Central Florida in the Fiesta Bowl and 12-1 Ohio State against 10-2 Clemson.

Most human observers and computers both agree that, this year at least, the BCS championship has the right match-up. When the switch to a 4-team playoff occurs next year, the complaints of the third place team will be replaced with those of the team rated fifth.

We're likely to wind up with just as much controversy as ever, but at least there will be an extra round of games with championship implications. And that means more money, more excitement and a boost to the ever-growing behemoth that is NCAA football.