The conference championship game was a made-for-television creation designed to solve another made-for-television creation: conference expansion.

Then college football conferences kept embarking on that initial made-for-television creation – expanding and expanding – to the point the made-for-television championship game has been ruined by all those made-for-television expansion creations.

Confused? So is the Big Ten.

Here in a season of its grandest revival, the Big Ten will stage its championship game Saturday night in Indianapolis with no guarantee that the winner will advance to the College Football Playoff. This is because the team almost everyone deems the league’s best is sitting at home.

Wisconsin and Penn State will play for a trophy and a forever accomplishment. Other than that, no one knows what it means, if anything.

View photos Penn State celebrates after beating Michigan State to win the Big Ten East division. (Getty) More

Meanwhile Ohio State, No. 2 in the national rankings but ostensibly/officially No. 3 in the league, is quite pleased to be relaxing back in Columbus … watching on television with nothing to lose. The Buckeyes’ 11-1 record with victories over Michigan, Wisconsin and non-league Oklahoma make them confident they have done enough to earn a playoff berth next Sunday. Should they be this secure? Who knows? This will be debated ad nauseam this week, particularly in comparison to Penn State.

Penn State and Wisconsin can’t do better than 11-2. The Lions will own a victory over Ohio State, but also setbacks to Michigan and non-league Pitt. Wisconsin will have beaten Penn State and out-of-conference LSU, but also lost to Ohio State and Michigan.

Michigan is also at 10-2 – with two excruciatingly close road losses – and boast head-to-head victories over both Penn State and Wisconsin (plus Colorado in non-league play). As such, the Wolverines actually have a better résumé for the selection committee than whoever actually wins the Big Ten. This is despite that Michigan is third … in its division.

Again, confused?

The problem is the Big Ten is really the Big Fourteen.

That means two completely unbalanced seven-team divisions, disparate schedules, a lack of commonality and, as such, no idea who the heck are actually the league’s two best teams – yet with a title game construct featuring supposedly just that. All this while trying to operate under the national playoff system that everyone cares a heck of a lot more about than a league championship.

It’s not unlike college basketball where top teams are often relieved when they get knocked out of their made-for-television conference tournament. Better to rest up for the Big Dance than care about the little one. Outside of smaller leagues, almost no one cares about those things anymore.

You could say this is a sad end to some sepia-toned tradition, when Midwest schools cared about nothing else but reaching the Rose Bowl. And you could feel bad that a simpler time was lost to evolution. But no one forced the Big Ten to expand and expand and expand to the point where a conference title game became a necessity, not just an economic engine.

The Big Ten and it alone created this. Besides, it was never clean and tidy.

In 1973, after Ohio State and Michigan played to a 10-10 tie to finish the season with identical 10-0-1 records, the league’s athletic directors voted the Buckeyes should represent the conference in Pasadena. Yes, a vote. Can you imagine that disaster in the modern media world?

View photos Wisconsin celebrates with the Big Ten West trophy after beating Minnesota. (Getty) More

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