Unincumbered by the thought process, enthusiasts of the new college football playoffs already are contending that a four-team tournament is too limited. There is clamoring to expand to eight teams. Or 16. Fans want it, the narrative goes; “fairness” demands it (poor TCU got left out this year). Excitement and the boffo TV ratings for the New Year’s Day’s inaugural semifinal round foretell it.

This, remember, is an activity of the NCAA, which describes itself as a non-profit organization, in spite of the billions of dollars it is raking in, and is performed by what the NCAA insists are “student-athletes,” though a more accurate label would be—at best—athlete-students.

The sad fact is that nobody—including the university presidents who long argued that expanding the postseason was an infringement upon their educational mission—appears willing or able to stand up to the steamrolling power of ESPN’s money and visibility.

Here’s an unsettling thought: Might the playoff system, now stretching one game beyond the traditional bowl season, have been realized so quickly if not for the revolting Jerry Sandusky child molestation revelations at Penn State in 2011?

At the time, Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, was chairman of the college president’s Oversight Committee for what was then called the BCS—Bowl Championship Series—that designated two top teams for a “championship” bowl. Spanier was on record declaring that a football playoff in college’s top division was “just not going to happen. The presidents of our universities are not going to go for it. We’re the ones who have the say.”

In a June 2010 interview with BlueWhite Illustrated, a Web site for Penn State sports, Spanier said, “Sports reporters and fans can talk about it all they want…. As if talking about it and debating it makes it more likely to change. Some people say, ‘Just go to four teams.’ Then four will go to eight and eight will go to 16. We’ll end up with an NFL-style playoff. Everyone knows where it will head if we go beyond two teams. I just don’t want to go in that direction.”

That oversight committee was formed in 2003 (Spanier was one of the founding members) and immediately began discussing the possibility of a major-college football playoff. In 2004, it hired UCLA administrator John Sandbrook to study the matter—and Sandbrook, in doing so again for the watchdog Knight Commission in 2007, became convinced that change would overtake the bowl system at some point.

That point was reached shortly after Spanier was dismissed by Penn State in November 2011 following public disclosure that Sandusky, assistant to Penn State head coach Joe Paterno, was a serial abuser of young boys. Both Spanier and Paterno were fired for failing to follow up on tips of Sandusky’s criminal behavior.

And Spanier barely was out of the BCS Oversight Committee scene when that group, in June 2012, voted unanimously to recommend a four-team playoff to begin in 2014-15.

So now, it is with cheerful indifference to the pitfalls of a thoroughly professional playoff, similar to ignoring the perils of coaches such as Paterno having virtually uncontested power over institutional and legal matters involving their teams, that a further expansion of the top-tier college season is inevitable.

Money talks. Loudly. Among Spanier’s comments, when he still was in his oversight position, was that he and fellow university presidents would not be swayed by the “potential” riches inherent in a playoff system. But the $7.3 billion that ESPN offered for 12 years of TV rights was enough to twist those presidents’ arms.

And the reality is that the big bucks hardly are earmarked for academic needs and professors’ salaries. In a discussion I had with Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist a couple of years ago regarding big-time college sports, Zimbalist reminded that “the NCAA, in effect, is a trade association for coaches and athletic directors. I don’t think anybody in his right mind would say this does anything to fulfill the educational purpose.”

Alabama’s Nick Saban, the nation’s highest paid college coach ($7 million a year), reasoned before his team lost its playoff semifinal to Ohio State that, “If you create value for the university, and you look at it for that standpoint, then I think there’s a relative amount that someone’s worth is based on.” Saban, like many football coaches at top public universities, earns more than any other state employee, including the governor and university president.

So here we go. First, Monday night’s hyped-up Oregon-Ohio State lollapalooza. Soon, an eight-team playoff. Then, probably, 12 teams, with a bye week for the top four built in. Then 16 teams? The evolution of The National (College) Football League—professional sports at its finest.

Don’t give higher education a thought; this is what fans and ESPN want.

Two things happen every early December: Army plays Navy in football and many Americans mark the anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered the U.S. entry into World War II. Because both events are linked to the military—and because of football’s traditional affection for warlike analogies—the tenuous connections can get a little weird.

There annually are over-the-top references to the Army and Navy players “preparing for battle,” as if strategizing for touchdowns somehow resembles life-and-death circumstances. Or strange expressions of anxieties assuming that gridiron mediocrity at West Point and Annapolis—for years on a level below the fully professional operations at Alabama, Florida State, Ohio State and so on—somehow translates into a creeping incompetence among U.S. soldiers and sailors.

Beyond that, Navy players in the late 1980s, in the midst of a three-game losing streak to Army, resorted to seeking motivation in what they called the “rumor” that whenever Navy would lose four consecutive years to Army, it meant the United States would go to war. Navy in fact had lost four straight right before World War I and, in the mid-1930s, before World War II broke out. Too bad Navy’s recent dominance—13 victories in a row, begun the year after 9/11, and counting—couldn’t do anything to negotiate the end to American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period.

It’s a tired old maxim that sports (and especially rough-and-tumble football) not only are a proxy for war but also a training ground for real international conflict. Britain’s Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the “battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” But, while fitness and persistence surely are as helpful in war as they are in football, what happens after every Army-Navy game is that everybody can just go out to dinner in peace.

In the midst of World War II, after Army won the 1944 game against Navy, victorious coach Red Blaik received a giddy telegram from the Pacific theater: “The greatest of all Army teams (stop) –we have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.” It was signed by General Douglas MacArthur, a West Point grad (MacArthur played baseball there) sounding every bit like a proud alum. Army’s victory, of course, did nothing to end those global hostilities.

More reasonable is to recall the memory of many fans attending the NFL game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers on Dec. 7, 1941, when news came of the devastating Pearl Harbor attack. They were struck by the incongruity of such a grave reality—the disorientation a younger generation felt on Sept. 11, 2001—intruding on a carefree afternoon at the stadium.

Football—sports in general—is better confined to its entertainment value than some good-vs.-evil world order. In fact, one beauty to the Army-Navy game is how immutable it is—same “fight” songs, same pre-game rituals, same mascots—while there remains hope that war is not permanent.

When Army and Navy played on Dec. 7, 1991—50 years after Pearl Harbor—there were appropriate halftime acknowledgments of that significant anniversary. But, too, the world had moved on. In the parking lot at the Philadelphia stadium that day, scores of Japenese cars, which had brought Americans to the game, were in evidence.

There is such a thing as ancient history. And games are just games.