The Big Ten commissioner even had a PowerPoint presentation to back it up. The 8-1 bowl record. The three New Year’s Day Six bowl victories. The television numbers, which showed half of the top 10 most-watched games from last season involved a Big Ten team. 

You know the rest. The Big Ten was left out of the College Football Playoff for the first time. The Big Ten champion missed the Playoff for the second straight season, which coincides with the nine-game conference schedule implemented in 2016. The Big Ten is really deep, and in this Playoff’s case, that can go both ways. Ask Ohio State the last two seasons.

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“I don’t think there’s any doubt that playing nine games in the kind of rigorous schedule that we play makes achieving an undefeated season more difficult,” Delany said on Monday. “It is true that the committee has not selected a team with two losses from any conference. So we’ll continue to watch it.”

There’s the catch. The Big Ten might have the best conference, but it also is the conference where the most Playoff-caliber teams have a chance of finishing with two losses or more. 

The nine-game conference schedule does allow for more frequent matchups between traditional rivals in different divisions, which keeps fans on both sides happy — to a certain extent.  

There are flaws within the schedule, too. After all, it was a cross-over matchup that cost Ohio State a shot at the Playoff when the Buckeyes lost at Iowa in a 55-24 blowout. That allowed one-loss Alabama — which plays an eight-game conference schedule — to hold off Ohio State for the final Playoff spot. This year, Michigan plays Nebraska, Northwestern and Wisconsin as part of a schedule which features six teams with 10 or more wins from last season.

Five of those teams are in the Big Ten. It’s a grinder where it’s almost impossible to go undefeated through the conference championship game. It cost Iowa and Wisconsin undefeated seasons in 2015 and ‘17, respectively. 

That’s the Catch-22 for the conference right now. It’s as strong as it has ever been. Four legitimate Playoff contenders reside in the Big Ten East among Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State. Wisconsin, the two-time defending Big Ten West champion, also belongs on that list. Nebraska brought back Scott Frost and could join that list soon. Northwestern is catching up as well, as shown by the program’s breathtaking, state-of-the-art facilities.

“You can have a very, very successful year even in a year where you’re not selected to play in the four-team Playoff,” Delany said. 

That’s great, but guess who doesn’t care?

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Alabama, Georgia and the SEC. Those are the teams that played in the College Football Playoff championship game last season, and that still carries more weight than an 8-1 bowl record. The SEC has played two all-conference championship games since 2011, and are 9-2 in championship games since the start of the BCS era.

The Big Ten has done everything — except add national championships. The Buckeyes may have won in 2002 and 2014, but Ohio State is the only school to have played for a national championship since the BCS era began. Michigan split a national title with Nebraska in 1997 when the Huskers were still in the Big 12. Penn State last won a national title in 1986.

The first four years of the Playoff have come with the same-old debates. Frost is in favor of expansion to eight teams. Penn State coach James Franklin talked about conferences playing the same number of conference games. Perhaps both coaches know the strength of the conference will continue to increase, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a Playoff berth for any of its teams. 

A Big Ten team will need to find a way to have one loss or fewer in the short term, even as the conference’s profile continues to grow. That’s reality, and it doesn’t require a PowerPoint presentation to make that point.

“We continue to build a conference and be as good as we can be and we think that includes playing each other as much as we can,” Delany said. “(We’ll continue) playing the best teams in the country in the nonconference as well as postseason and continuing to make the case that our teams are among the four best in the country.”