We are sitting smack in the middle of one of the best long football weekends of the season - a five-course meal consisting of four NFL wild-card contests and college football's national championship game on Monday night in New Orleans.

It should all taste great, and most of it will. But there's something wrong - a bad aftertaste left by a shoddy system.

As usual, the problem is on the college football side, where the Bogus Championship Series once again will prove a poor substitute for the playoff system that college football's top-most level so badly needs.

The NFL's playoff system is simple, brutal and absolutely fair. Twelve teams out of 32 make the playoffs. Those 12 knock each other out, one loss at a time, in 11 playoff games until only the Super Bowl champion is left standing.

The NFL occasionally will tweak its system - for instance, this year for the first time a game can't end with a field goal by the team that receives the overtime kickoff - but that's all it ever does and all it needs to do. Despite the occasional bad call or controversy, NFL playoff football is about as close to perfect as pro sports get.

The system for college football's biggest teams on the other hand - officially known as the Bowl Championship Series, although it sports many less favorable nicknames - needs a complete overhaul.

Louisiana State and Alabama will play for the national title Monday night, but who's to say Alabama really is the best challenger for the undefeated Tigers? There's even an outside chance LSU could lose a close national title game and still win at least one version of the national title - The Associated Press poll. That is absolutely nuts.

Should Oklahoma State be playing in Monday's national title game instead of Alabama? Who knows?

The BCS pretends it has things under control, pointing to the years where a national champion that most could live with ended up getting crowned. But the system is inherently flawed - beholden to bowls that make so much money and determine so little.

Yes, many of the college bowls have been exciting if you like offense, with scores like 41-38, 67-56 and 70-33. Overtime periods have cropped up everywhere.

But it is all fool's good. The players deserve better - a true playoff like at the NCAA's other levels of college football and in its other sports as well.

If LSU wins Monday night and finishes undefeated and the consensus national champion, that still doesn't make the BCS right. The system didn't put LSU in the position it should be - much like the Green Bay Packers or New England Patriots, with a first-round playoff bye but still having to win multiple postseason games to win a title.

Boise State is not in one of the power conferences and has been on both ends of the BCS equation over the years. This season Boise State got shafted - skipped over for an at-large BCS spot in favor of two schools from power conferences (Virginia Tech and Michigan) ranked below the Broncos.

"Everybody is just very tired of the BCS," Boise State coach Chris Petersen told reporters recently. "I think that's the bottom line. Everybody is frustrated. Everybody doesn't really know what to do anymore. It doesn't make sense to anybody. I don't think anybody is happy anywhere. ... The whole thing needs to be changed, there's no question about it."

Bravo.

Certainly Petersen has a dog in the hunt, but that doesn't change the fact that those comments are spot on. The BCS pretends to be for the fan, but it is really for the fat cats.

I'm an inherent optimist, and I believe at some point college officials finally will do what's right and amend the system. It might be two years, or it might be 10. But when they do, they need look no further than the NFL's 11 games worth of "Survivor" episodes to figure out the best way to keep fans happy and give a great sport a true champion.