Three straight league champions left out of the CFP.

The Big Ten bet wrong on nine conference games. The two leagues that play eight conference games — the ACC and SEC — are the only two leagues to qualify for each CFP. Those leagues happily and prominently play FCS opponents, as well.

The committee doesn’t care, nor see how an extra conference game — Alabama playing at Florida, for example, or Clemson traveling to Miami — might be significantly harder, for several reasons, than a random game against, say, Colorado State or Tulsa.

Either the Big Ten ditches its nine-game approach — not happening — lobbies for an expanded playoff or desires to be represented on the committee by a bulldog whose team has little chance of actually making the CFP but wants to stump for the league in a way that improves its chances in the voting process.

The committee is composed of humans, after all. They can be convinced. Surely conversations in that room are more dynamic than each voter sitting in a silent chamber.

Do I think it’s a total coincidence that for the three years Wisconsin A.D. Barry Alvarez was on the committee, the Big Ten managed to place a team in the CFP? I do not.