Pat Fitzgerald calls College Football Playoff no different than the BCS

The 2019 Big Ten Media Days get everybody talking.

Football is right around the corner and the media gets to ask questions to coaches and players throughout the two-day event. The event, spanning over Thursday and Friday, is televised on BTN.

On Friday, Pat Fitzgerald and the Northwestern Wildcats were one of the teams featured. The Wildcats made it to the Big Ten Championship a year ago before losing to an extremely talented Ohio State team. Despite winning the Big Ten, the Buckeyes didn’t make the College Football Playoff.

In fact, the Big Ten hasn’t had a representative in the CFP the past two years. Fitzgerald was asked about the Big Ten not making the four-team playoff recently and what’s wrong about that.

"To me, to have a true champion we have to have the same data points. Until we do that it's not any different than it was in the BCS. It's just a different name." Pat Fitzgerald. @NUFBFamily #BigTenMediaDays

— 🏈LastWordOnCFB🏈 (@LastWordOnCFB) July 19, 2019

Fitzgerald said "shared data points" are necessary to have a fair assessment of who should be in playoffs. There's been discussion the last two days about how Big Ten is disadvantaged by nine-game schedule.

— Bill Rabinowitz 🗞 (@brdispatch) July 19, 2019

Fitzgerald brings up a point that many are making. The nine-game conference schedule doesn’t match that of other Power 5 conferences. It isn’t fair. The scheduling of non-conference opponents isn’t exactly fair either.

Not everybody schedules the same. Although, sports isn’t fair. It never has been.

But, in order to safely say at the end of the year who the true national champion is, we do need shared data points. Fitzgerald knows that much.