THE EXPANDED College Football Playoff will make a lot of people rich (Shutterstock).

Now comes the real gold rush.

A real college football playoff system, once regarded as the most horrifying athletic innovation since night baseball, is about to blow past the World Series and college basketball’s March Madness as a premier sports betting event.

Oh, excuse me. Did I somehow confuse university physical education with gambling? Mea culpa!

Anyway, the College Football Playoff management committee this week not only made a few tweaks on how the 12-team playoff field for the 2024-25 season will be determined, and then members began to consider how they might up the ante from 12 to 14 teams.

You have to know that once those folks start talking “14” they are really thinking “16” or more. Why not 18 to 24? College basketball has a field of 68 with no top end in sight, a fiesta worth $891 million in TV rights.

Actually, I don’t mind this. College football, in my opinion, is more interesting to watch than hoops and the growth of the CFP is evidence of what I – and others – have carped about for so long.

The main thing that stood between the entirely logical playoff idea for pigskin was the fat paychecks being paid to the people what ran the big holiday bowl games. Fearful that a playoff system would lessen the prestige of their games, they ginned up the defense that playoff games would injured the academic progress of their athletes.

Somehow that logic didn’t apply to lower levels of NCAA football ….

But now that there are dump trucks full of money pulling up, sweeping away all such doubts, the days of November (or Winter) Madness are surely on the way. Go team(s)!