On Thursday night, a 9-year-old boy in Ohio will put on the black-and-red jersey he got for Christmas, sit down with dad in front of a television and fall in love with college football.

The rest of America will yawn. The Cincinnati Bearcats playing the Virginia Tech Hokies in the Orange Bowl? Unless you are affiliated with these teams, it's a snoozer bad enough to send one flipping to a re-run of Grey's Anatomy.

That could be said for most of the games on Thursday's schedule. Who wants to watch a four-loss Iowa against a five-loss South Carolina? Or a four-loss Nebraska play a five-loss Clemson? No offense to the fine folks who run Florida bowls in Orlando, Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville, but playing on Jan. 1 has lost some luster.

What was once the high holy day of the college football season now looks like a lineup for ESPNU in September.

It didn't used to be this way.

Before the Bowl Championship Series deflated New Year's Day like a pinhole in the Goodyear Blimp, playing on Jan. 1 was an honor reserved for the best the game could offer. Corporations had not yet hijacked bowl names and television was not yet dictating kickoffs before lunch. Legendary coaches of legendary teams (hello, Bear Bryant) roamed the sidelines on New Year's Day instead of former legends of five-loss teams (hello, Steve Spurrier).

Today the games serve as day-long infomercial for the games coming next week to a TV network near you. The football will be no more inspiring — and a lot less colorful — than the Tournament of Roses Parade. We get the pageantry, yes, but one can't help but feel we're clinging to tradition that no longer exists.

Contrast Thursday's slate to the lineup on the day I fell in love with college football.

On Jan. 1, 1979, I was that 9-year-old boy wearing the jersey and sitting down with pops. I sprang from my bed before the sun came up, watched the parades and counted down the minutes until kickoff. It was an anticipation rivaled only by Christmas morning. Food. Family. Football. More food. More football.

Mid-day gave us the greatest Cotton Bowl ever, with Joe Montana rallying Notre Dame with three touchdowns in the final eight minutes to beat Houston 35-34. Then came the Sugar Bowl and No. 2 Alabama's goal-line stand to beat No. 1 Penn State 14-7. The Rose Bowl gave us the day's controversy, with USC using a phantom touchdown by Charles White to beat Michigan, 17-10. Night brought the Orange Bowl spectacle of Oklahoma defeating Nebraska in a rematch of elite teams.

Has there ever been a better New Year's Day?

The action came with a soundtrack. New Year's Day in 1979 meant Keith Jackson's "Whoa, Nellie!" and Lindsey Nelson's Cotton Bowl twang. Kirk Herbstreit and Charles Davis just won't measure up Thursday. For coaches, 1979 meant Bear Bryant. Joe Paterno. John Robinson. Bo Schembechler. On Thursday we meet Dabo Swinney.

We still have some good football to watch. Who wouldn't want to see Penn State take on USC on Thursday in the Rose Bowl? At least Paterno's still around. Orlando's Capital One Bowl has a nice matchup between Georgia and Michigan State, but in the old days that was a matchup worthy of late December. The Sugar Bowl is gone, moved to Jan. 2. So is the Cotton Bowl. The Fiesta Bowl, which used to be a tuneup game but grew to become a biggie, is now Jan. 5. We have big bowls and small bowls between Thursday and the BCS title game on Jan. 8.

They are all part of a 34-bowl mess that has devalued the entire system and trashed the traditions that made Thursday special.

Someday perhaps we'll finally get that much debated college football playoff system, and if so, perhaps historians will look at New Year's Day 1979 and say it never was better than that.

The irony is that the events of that day, in part, led us to Thursday's lackluster lineup. The '79 Sugar Bowl whetted the appetite for a true No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. And there was controversy because Alabama and USC — which defeated the Tide that season — split the national title. It helped set into motion the machinery to evolve into the BCS system.

It's not an improvement.