What a place. Actually, it's not all that much to look at, the old low-slung structure in the middle of the Arroyo Seco, just up the winding Pasadena Freeway - a real-life version of a driving video game - from Los Angeles. But what a patch of historic turf, surrounded by two golf courses, my home tracks, tragically used as parking lots on game day. For years, I even arose early, went to the Tournament of Roses Parade with the family, then hauled off to watch Michigan play Washington or USC play Ohio State.

It was college football's pageantry.

Today, it will be college football's championship game.

So-called.

The BCS lucked out this year, getting USC and Texas in Granddad's crib. The environs will be terrific and maybe the game will be, too.

But the whole notion of the Rose Bowl, a concoction to enhance a civic celebration and benefit a community where I lived and of which I remain fond, was, in my experience, more a regional thing. A chance for a team from the West Coast to demonstrate to those arrogant SOBs from the Big Ten that their presumptive view of themselves as the holy cradle of football was overblown.

To a lot of people in Pasadena and around the greater Los Angeles area, the BCS's introduction into the Rose Bowl, every once in a while bequeathing a bogus title game, is more an intrusion. It does not bolster the color and pageantry of college football, especially in off years, it bastardizes it, and, then, congratulates itself for elevating a counterfeit champion.

There will be few such complaints tonight - if the Trojans win. Maybe even if they lose.

But the college football postseason is a jumbled mess right now, consisting of a bunch of bowls of almost no consequence, all overshadowed by one manufactured championship game that, in most years, isn't even near authentic. We've all said it a thousand times, and, until it changes, we should go on saying it, that a 16-team playoff, incorporating the bowls, can add consistent meaning to those bowls that they presently lack. Other lesser bowls would continue within the confines of their status quo. Even more importantly, a playoff would allow student-athletes in Division I-A football to join every other college athlete in every other sport, including football in Divisions I-AA, II, III, to truly earn and prove their championship status.

That is of clear value to players and teams and schools from BCS leagues and non-BCS leagues. In short, it benefits everyone, including fans of college football. It also would generate a turbo-load of cash. The problem is, how would that money be sorted and divided up, and who currently in power would forfeit power via a new format?

We, woefully, will never know how good last year's Utes really were because they were assigned to play an inferior opponent, on account of contractual obligations, in the Fiesta Bowl. How pathetic, and competitively corrupt, is that?

University presidents who block a playoff use faulty logic in preventing its implementation, saying it's too time consuming and, thereby, would have an adverse effect on student-athletes' abilities to study. They conveniently ignore that the NCAA already is allowing student-athletes in the other divisions to do the playoff thing. And that the NCAA basketball tournament is just as demanding and comprehensive as a football playoff would be.

It is notable that the same week of the Rose Bowl marks the start of the best postseason in all of pro sports - the NFL playoffs, a configuration that requires teams to qualify, requires teams to continually bring everything to the field in a do-or-die, one-and-done format. It requires - and yields - the best that sports can be - for fans and competitors. And it crowns a real champ.

Its equivalent is the aforementioned NCAA Tournament, which, unlike the NBA, does not mess with contrived best-of-seven series. It demands performance in that moment, in every moment. Every game is a seventh game. The combination of the tournament's structure, along with its immediacy, is its magic.

I love the Rose Bowl. It's traditionally been punctuation for a city's celebration, a quaint little skirmish between schools from regions that want to punch one another in the mouth, all encircled in the usual winter warmth of the Southern California climate and, ultimately, settling bragging rights for another year.

Not anymore.

Last season, Texas and Michigan faced off.

This year, it is a so-called title game, a darn good so-called title game, but a counterfeit, nonetheless, set up by random fortune. How great would it have been had it come at the end of a genuine playoff? As it is, the Rose Bowl is now an imposter, an alternating pawn in a corrupt system. The old bowl, the old receptacle of a dozen of my battered and cut-up Titleists, was better the way it used to be.

gmonson@sltrib.com