Earlier this week, Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt laid out a plan for improving college football on his podcast. He wants to expand the Playoff, but doing so would require adding another weekend of games. His solution? Move Army-Navy to week zero of the season. He wants this for Army-Navy's own good, you see.

“So what do we do with Army-Navy?" he said. "It’s getting pinched by the Heisman. It’s getting pinched by the Playoff. We now play a bowl game on the same day. It’s not in the right spot. Army-Navy needs to start the football season. Week zero of football. And mind you, I didn’t say college. I didn’t say the NFL. It’s because it’s both.”

Never mind that this year's game just pulled its highest viewership since CBS started broadcasting it in 1990. No, the game's getting "pinched!" That just can't stand, and Klatt loves Army-Navy so much that he wants it to be the only game on week zero. That way, it can be the "national anthem of the sport!" What great fun that would be.

On Thursday, college football's moral conscience and most esteemed caretaker, Paul Finebaum, was on The Matt Barrie Show voicing his concerns about the overlap between the College Football Playoff and the NFL playoffs. He feels the week of Army-Navy would be best spent serving the Playoff instead.

"Well, we're wasting a week," he said. "I know I'm going to upset somebody, but the week of the Army-Navy game needs to be in the playoffs. That is a wasted Saturday. What do we have? We have the Army-Navy game and the Heisman. We can't figure that out some other time?"

That seems a bit patronizing when talking about a game that surpassed the Iron Bowl in ratings by more than two million viewers, but I get it. You don't want anything getting in the way of what really matters: the Playoff.

Talking heads are a dime a dozen, so dismissing their ideas of moving Army-Navy as idle chatter is easy. Don't make that mistake. When people like Klatt and Finebaum float proposals like this, they're speaking ex cathedra. These aren't independent thoughts from independent thinkers. These are the ideas their employers want introduced to the national conversation. It's the Big Ten, SEC, and their broadcast partners who want to move Army-Navy. Klatt's feigning concern about the game's well-being is profoundly unserious.

It was inevitable that Army-Navy would eventually be in the crosshairs. The Playoff is the culmination of a process that began with the formation of the College Football Association in 1977. The NFL is the king of American sports media, and for almost 50 years, television executives looked at college football as a chance to create a second golden goose. Their goal has not been to embrace the eccentricities that endear the sport to its fans. Their goal has been to distill the oddities away to appeal to lowest-common-denominator television consumers. It doesn't matter if you love the game; all that matters is that people are just interested enough to watch.

The result has been a bland corporatization of everything that made college football wonderful. Instead of a chaotic landscape of 100+ teams, conferences, prodded by their television partners, have consolidated the top brands into a few leagues. Rivalries like Oklahoma-Nebraska that defined the sport for decades are now expendable. Conference championships are seen as a burden. The Rose Bowl is no longer a crowning achievement but a stepping-stone rematch between conference opponents. New Year's Day is no longer a national holiday of college football. The weekly high stakes that made the regular season unique have been cast aside in favor of a playoff that looks like every other American sport. And all the while, the same talking heads tell us how successful it's been because people are watching and TV is making money.

Well, people watch Army-Navy, too. CBS knows the game's value, and so do its sponsors. Army-Navy is both the culmination of a season and a season unto itself. It is the last stand for everything in college football that's been taken from us: rivalry games, players with a real connection to their schools, and the importance of the regular season. To those who genuinely love college football, that's the definition of success. They love the game right where it is.

Let's not sacrifice everything at the altar of a made-for-TV playoff and kill what charm college football has left. Leave Army-Navy alone.