Many have begun to question whether Wisconsin would deserve one of the four spots in the College Football Playoff even if they finish the season at 13-0 and win the Big 10. The day that an undefeated Power 5 conference champion is left out of the CFP is the day that the current 4-team system dies.

I’m not a Wisconsin fan, I haven’t found them particularly impressive even against a weak schedule, and I’m by no means saying they deserve to be locked into the playoff at this particular moment. But, the difficulty of going undefeated in a Power 5 conference merits a shot at the championship. It’s hard not to lose. Like, really hard. There are games where the better teams loses and you can see that from several of the current one-loss teams in the top 15. There are fluke games, but there are not fluke seasons.

Their schedule is weak, there’s no disagreement from me there.

The Big 10 West is down. Wisconsin avoided playing the top three teams in the East during the regular season and their toughest non-conference game was against Florida Atlantic. That’s why I have no issue with them currently being placed outside of the top 4. But the committee has shown that their rankings leading up to the final decision are largely for purposes of transparency.

The only reason the committee needs to start releasing rankings in October is so that the process doesn’t feel like a shady and arbitrary exercise completed behind closed doors (it still is). Flash back to the first year of the CFP in 2014 when TCU dropped three spots from third place in the second-to-last ranking to sixth place in the final ranking. The day prior, TCU beat Iowa State by 52 points. The four teams ultimately selected were the correct ones. TCU didn’t have a conference championship game and was punished for it. But what 2014 showed is that the exercise of weekly rankings in a system designed to reward the four best teams at the end of the season is a farce.

A 13-0 Wisconsin team will have wins against Iowa, Michigan and the winner of the Big 10 East. As it stands now, their strength of schedule is 68th in the country, per Sagarin. That’s not great. But beating a ranked Ohio State or Michigan State in the B1G title game could very well put them ahead of where Washington’s schedule was ranked in 2016. Even factoring in their game against Alabama in the CFP, the Huskies finished with the 53rd ranked schedule last season.

Washington earned their spot because they were a one-loss champion of a Power 5 conference.

Penn State had a more difficult schedule, a “signature win,” and one more loss than Washington. Oklahoma finished with a more difficult schedule, was a conference champion and also had one more loss. The precedent is there — if Wisconsin sits at 13-0 as Big 10 champions this season, another team with one loss, conference champion or not, cannot be reasonably included if the Badgers are not.

We’re all guilty of playing the mental game college football fans like to engage in where they conclude that every team is actually bad. That game becomes a whole lot easier to play when you look at teams with one loss. Clemson lost to Syracuse? They stink. Notre Dame lost to Georgia but Georgia lost to Alabama? Alabama didn’t play anyone either. They’re all bad! The circular reasoning goes on and on.

The only precedent for a major conference champion being unable to compete for the national championship was Auburn in 2004. There were two undefeated teams ahead of them, which was the best possible scenario to argue for a four-team playoff at the very least. Now that we have one, common sense should win out. If you win all of your games in one of the five best conferences in college football, you have earned your spot among the four teams in the playoff.