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.

View photos

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).

[Related: Don't expect system to expand anytime soon]

They said a lot of things. Almost none of it was true.

In 2010, Rick Baker, president of the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic, said, "A playoff system would ruin the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic."

Tuesday, Rick Baker, president of the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic, said, "It's a great day for college football. We congratulate the conference commissioners and presidents for their diligent work to enhance the postseason."

It was all the ridiculousness, all the dishonesty, all the worst parts of college sports. And none of the good stuff, just one measly championship game, often with a disputed matchup, 40-something days after the season ended.

That always was the problem. It is one thing to lie. It is one thing to insult our intelligence with claims that a playoff would cause Ohio State to tank a game against Michigan (never). It is one thing to say those computers, the ones you didn't understand or even know the formula they used, were about "math" when actual mathematicians called them nonsense.

Story continues