New Year's Day used to be a festival if you were a college football fan. Now it's just a day to nurse a hangover.

As it has in most other areas, tradition has gone out the window on New Year's Day, a price that was paid supposedly for the opportunity to regularly match the two best teams in the nation in a national championship game.

The BCS has managed to bungle that assigment about as consistently as John Kerry bungled his Presidential campaign. This year, for example, they have USC and Oklahoma squaring off in the FedEx Orange Bowl on Jan. 4.

Yes, Jan. 4 — three days after the Orange Bowl used to be played, when it was part of a four-bowl parlay that destroyed more than a few marriages and kept fans staring at the TV screen until they needed Visine intravenously injected.

This year, at least the BCS can argue it got the teams right, even though Auburn is undefeated and believes fervently that it deserves to be in the championship game. The Orange Bowl will not only feature great players, but four of the five Heisman finalists.

New Year's bowls Fiesta: Utah (12-0) wins respect Rose: Texas silences doubters Capital One: Iowa shocks LSU, Saban Gator: 'Noles avoid 3rd bowl loss in row Outback: Great exit for Georgia's Greene Cotton: Tennessee routs Texas A&M Vote: Top moment?

But the rightness of the Orange Bowl being for the national championship this year is not the issue. The issue is the passing of a great tradition that lasted for nearly a century — the four New Year's Day bowls. It was always the same for decades — Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and the grand-daddy of them all, the Rose Bowl.

Not only were the bowls big, but they were representative in many ways of different parts of the country. You knew, for example, the Big Ten and the Pac-10 champions would battle it out in Pasadena, Calif., while people back east sat snow-bound in their houses looking at the long shadows cast across the California gridiron and dreaming of what it must feel like to wear shorts in January.

You knew the Southwest Conference champion would host the Cotton Bowl and the Southeastern Conference champion the Sugar Bowl. As for the Orange Bowl it was kind of a free-for-all, but it always seemed like Nebraska or Oklahoma was there waiting for somebody.

It was all part of the mystique, a traditional piece of New Year's Day that now seems as shopworn as the Rose Bowl parade. They were sacrificed for what always seems to win out these days. The big dollars.

Does anyone really care if Texas, once of the Southwest Conference but now in something called the Big 12, beats Michigan in the Rose Bowl? After all, the only reason they're in this game is that they weren't good enough to end up in the national title game. That game, by the way, may not be the grand-daddy of bowl games, but it's the "Who's Your Papi" of bowl games. At least this year.

And by the way, shouldn't Texas be playing in the Q-Tip Cotton Bowl game?

No, because Tennessee played Texas A&M -- and what a rout this game was. What happened to the days when the Cotton Bowl officials would often bring in the best Eastern team they could find like Roger Staubach's Navy team or Jim Brown's Syracuse squad? They didn't always bring in an East Coast team, but they did always have the Southwest Conference champion hosting.

Can't really do that any more since the Southwest Conference has gone the way of the dodo bird. Extinct. Dead by means of poor financing.

The Sugar Bowl used to be the Southeastern Conference champion vs. a major team of their choice. Now they're sandwiched between New Year's Day's six-bowl lineup and the national championship game on Tuesday night. With no Monday night football game, the Nokia Sugar Bowl (what's so sweet about their cell phones?) gets that date, Jan. 3, and pits Virginia Tech vs. Auburn. The latter would rather be playing for free delivery from FedEx than free phones from Nokia but you gotta take the cash where you find it.

This is not to say New Year's Day isn't still stuffed to the gills with college football. It is. There's just no tradition to it except for the age-old one of the robber barons. Take the money and run. If you run for a touchdown that's good too. If you don't, slow down and walk to the ATM machine.

That is unless you really believe the Outback (We Have Takeout) Bowl that matched Georgia vs. Wisconsin (how'd they get in a bowl?) is tradition-laden. Or perhaps your cup of traditional tea goes for something more meaningful. Like, say, the Capital One (the interest is on us) Bowl which had former half-national champion LSU vs. seldom a Big Ten champion Iowa. By the way, since the Big Ten really has 11 teams is it any wonder Maurice Clarett had trouble with math class at Ohio State?

But who cares? There's money to be made even without a conference championship behind you. Who needs to win everything when you have 28 bowl games between Dec. 14th's New Orleans Bowl (which believe it or not is actually in New Orleans but, hey, isn't that where the Sugar Bowl is?) to the FedEx Bowl on Jan. 4.

Sorry, it's the FedEx Orange Bowl. After all, we wouldn't want to completely break with tradition now, would we?

If you played in the Insight Bowl, what insights did you come away with? If you were Notre Dame's new head coach Charlie Weis, you came away with this insight — maybe taking this job wasn't such a good idea after all.

But that would be fitting because none of this was such a good idea.

At least not if you lived back in the day when New Year's Day meant four big bowl games often between traditional rivals. Four games that actually stood for something. Now all they stand for is a payday.

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