Sake of Argument Vanishes in a Sensible B.C.S. Finale Bob Donnan/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters Jameis Winston scoring for Florida State in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game. In its final season, college football's beleaguered postseason system, known as the Bowl Championship Series, seemed destined for one last controversy. This felt not only likely but somehow appropriate. Fans, pundits, coaches, players - they could all but put it on the schedule. Dec. 7: conference championship games for some teams; final regular-season matchups for others. Dec. 8: Argue about, rip into and generally belittle the B.C.S., a target easily and fairly among the most maligned in sports. It's funny, then, how everything played out. How Auburn won a shootout with Missouri to vanquish its second top-five foe in the last two weeks. How Ohio State stumbled for the first time in two years. How Florida State bludgeoned another overmatched opponent. Where chaos was expected, there was peace. As those three games barreled toward their conclusions Saturday, it became clear that this season's national championship would be created without controversy. The same could be said, for the most part, for all of this season's B.C.S. selections. The same could be said for many years of the B.C.S. standings, despite all the ridicule lobbed at the selection process. So Florida State will meet Auburn in January in Pasadena, Calif., with the national championship at stake. This is the game almost everybody wanted - everybody, that is, outside Ohio, the home of the Buckeyes. Just as the Seminoles tangled with a Southeastern Conference team (Tennessee) for the inaugural B.C.S. title in the 1998 season, they will do so again for the final one. "What a final season for the B.C.S.," said a giddy Bill Hancock, the organization's executive director, on a conference call late Sunday. He added, "There was some nostalgia around here today." Hancock, naturally, focused on the times the B.C.S."s convoluted formula worked out. He cited one of his favorite statistics: that in the 56 years before the B.C.S., the top two teams in the country squared off in a bowl game eight times. In 16 years of the B.C.S., the top two teams in the organization's standings met at the end of each season, and the Associated Press top 25 poll agreed on 13 occasions, Hancock said. "We've gotten it right way more times than we've created controversy," he said. I find it interesting that people tend to focus on the times we've had debate. Regardless, change is coming; next year, college football will introduce a four-team playoff system. In future years, that system is very likely to be expanded, at least to eight teams. And yet while the postseason itself will change for good in about a month, the final pairing also felt familiar. The state of Alabama will have yet another representative in the championship bout, for the fifth straight year. The SEC, the conference that spawned the winners of the previous seven national titles (including Auburn, for the 2010 season), will be gunning for an eighth straight. If destiny factors at all into the results of sporting events, if you believe in lucky bounces and momentum and whatever cannot easily be explained, then both teams can lay claim to the D-word, in their own way. For Auburn, there was the late touchdown pass against Georgia that deflected off a defender's hands. There was the field goal that Alabama missed at the end of the Iron Bowl, that Auburn's Chris Davis raced from his own end zone into college football lore. Then there was Saturday's SEC title game, against Missouri, secured by Auburn with 59 points. For Florida State, destiny was dominance, not thrilling victories in the closing seconds. The Seminoles crushed Duke on Saturday in the Atlantic Coast Conference title game, much as they crushed every team their schedule placed in front of them. They outscored teams by an average of 42.3 points and won 12 games by at least 27 and another by 14. In their locker room afterward, talk had already turned toward Auburn, and toward the SEC, the recent undisputed king of college football conferences. Jimbo Fisher, the Florida State coach with SEC roots, expanded on his time as the quarterbacks coach at Auburn and the 1993 season, when the Tigers finished undefeated. Viv Bernstein contributed reporting.