分类： IT业界
2012-06-28 15:23:35
Deep down, part of the appeal, or at least part of the deal, of being a college football fan is the corruption.
You have to employ a situational moral sliding scale to fully embrace a sport where everyone gets paid but the players, and even a lot of those who eventually make NFL riches wind up broke because they didn't get much of an education.
You have to ignore the concussions and depressions. You have to pretend that the star tailback's aunt really could afford that tricked-out car he drives, the one conveniently registered in her name. You have to believe that your school, and probably your school alone, and certainly not your archrival, does it the "right way" even if the right way was probably the University of Chicago, which gave up on the entire charade 70 years ago.
Crowing the national champion will take on a new meaning starting with the 2014 season. (Reuters)You do it because there's really nothing like those perfect Saturday afternoons of pomp and circumstance, tailgates and touchdowns.
Give us the game and, well, we'll forget all the ugly stuff for a while. We'll forget it for a lifetime, actually. We might even want our kids to sneak in our ashes and sprinkle them near the 50-yard line so the game can't forget us, either.
That, perhaps more than anything else, was what drove the anger against the BCS, which was killed off (or will be in two seasons) Tuesday, when college football's powers-that-be agreed to stage a four-team playoff.
The BCS was all the corruption and none of the joy. It was all the lies and none of the action. It was all the greed and under-the-table deals and cronyism gone nuts, without giving us the thrill of a playoff.
It was a bunch of suits stuffing hundreds in each other's pockets in the Grille Room of the Arizona Biltmore. It caused PR people to say stupid things, such as how they could never accept an "NFL-style playoff" because, you know, the biggest entertainment property in the country somehow was a bad thing.
So they wouldn't even give us a high school-style playoff. They pretended it would ruin the regular season (it won't), that it would curb bowl-game charitable donations (they actually give extremely little), that it would be an impediment to student-athletes' academic progress (everyone always laughed at that one).
