You can't help but feel a certain emptiness now that the bowl season is over, a dull melancholia that can't be readily described but blurts out commonly in forms such as this: C'mon, is that all there are, 33 bowl games?

Even as an unofficial 34th, tonight's Soulless Multinational Corporation BCS Purported National Championship Game, promises a measure of college football closure, you're still dealing with the fact that 54 teams in the game's top tier had their seasons end abruptly in the late fall.

I know -- indescribable heartache.

Do you mean to tell me that the great minds and oversized can-do egos who brought us the Beef O'Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl (Rutgers 45, Central Florida 24, as if you could forget) can't conceptualize just 27 more bowl games so that not even the 2-10 Ball State Cardinals have to withstand the emotional trauma of having nowhere to go for the holidays?

I mean those guys beat Eastern Michigan and Western Michigan.

With only 68 teams involved in college football's postseason then, great moments weren't exactly strung like Griswoldian exterior illumination throughout the holidays.

You might think it was great that Pitt beat North Carolina in the Busted Water Pump Bowl or that Penn State toppled Louisiana State in the What's In Your Wallet Classic, but those games were memorable for nothing other than their identical final scores, 19-17. Penn State should be ashamed of itself for failing to beat LSU by anything less than 40-17, as the Tigers were offering a performance so pitiful that they had more penalties than first downs.

The Konica Minolta Gator Bowl was entirely forgettable, except perhaps for West Virginia's Noel Devine entering the NFL draft at some point late in the third quarter. While Devine suddenly exhausted his eligibility, or had it exhausted for him, Florida State went on to a 33-21 victory, but it won't be clear for a while whether that will be added to the 14 victories the NCAA stripped from the Seminoles this week for a widespread academic cheating scandal.

Ground zero on that issue was a music history course that players allegedly got oodles of help with as an extra benefit. The NCAA decided it was grievous case of lack of institutional control. In other words, when it came to the music history scandal, Florida State took the position if it's not Baroque, don't fix it.

Auburn and Northwestern provided most of the bowl season's entertainment in an overtime Outback Bowl that saw Auburn players storm the field to celebrate victory something like 33 times, finally for a legitimate reason when they held on for a 38-35 win mostly because they had injured Northwestern's regular kicker on the next-to-last play.

Mike Kafka threw 78 pitches for the Wildcats that day, 47 strikes, 31 balls.

There were nine turnovers, illustrating still again that sometimes you can't tell the best of college football from the worst of college football. This is not to diminish the Humanitarian Bowl, which needs no diminishment. The big HB delivered a 43-42 victory by Idaho over Bowling Green, two teams that not only don't like each other, but likely didn't know each other existed before the holidays.

In any event, that brings us to tonight, when Alabama and Texas meet in Pasadena to decide absolutely nothing.

Again.

Not because Boise State is 14-0 and absent from the climactic game. Not because of the innate imbalances of the BCS. Not because Alabama and Texas aren't worthy of at least some version of the still highly mythical national championship.

It's mostly because neither Alabama nor Texas has played a football game in 33 days, a vast scheduling dead spot that results in the equivalent of playing the Super Bowl on March 1.

If the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints, for example, decided possession of the Lombardi Trophy after being idle for five weeks, could the result even feign legitimacy?

Texas, last I looked, had been beaten by Nebraska until a replay official put one second back on the clock at the end of regulation, allowing the Longhorns to put through a field goal and get a reservation for tonight. Their hopes pivot on whether quarterback Colt McCoy has recovered from the nine sacks the Huskers put on him that night, half of 'em (4.5) by Ndumakong (A Boy Named) Suh. But again, he has had five weeks to clear his head.

It says here that Alabama will win, as it is the habit of the champions of the Southeast Conference to win the supposed title game as well, but further, Alabama will win because of the Google test.

If you type "Alabama" into Google's search window, Google thinks you're talking Alabama football before you get to the 'm.' Football is first in the Alabama drop down menu. If you do the same thing with Texas, you won't see anything about the Longhorns until after the Texas lottery and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Texas football is sixth on the list.

That's pretty persuasive to me.

Is this any way to decide the national champion?

Heck no, it's only as good as the way we've got.

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.