In a league that boasts personalities ranging from Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz to Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, unanimity can be rare. However, the entire conference can agree on one thing: It’s time to get the Big Ten back into the College Football Playoffs.

Easier said than done.

The Football Playoffs comprise the top four teams at the end of the regular season and the conference-championship games, as voted on by the playoffs committee. The Big Ten had a representative in each of the first three years of the playoffs, but the conference has been left out in the past two years of the committee’s final four.

Coaches and players from all 14 Big Ten football teams gathered in Chicago last week for the conference’s annual media event.

“I think obviously when you’re left out of the playoffs for two years in a row, there needs to be discussions, and discussions are going on,” Penn State head coach James Franklin said. “And I think we’ve got to look at it all.”

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Those discussions range from shortening the nine-game conference schedule back to eight to realigning the Big Ten’s two divisions.

“I think the nine conference games is something that needs to be discussed,” Franklin said. “When you play nine conference games, you’re going to have more losses in your conference; mathematics tell you that.”

Head coach of the 2018 Big Ten West Champion Northwestern Pat Fitzgerald agrees with Franklin as far as questioning the number of league games, and he also wants to see the playoff committee reward the conference for its competitive slate.

“The last couple years, obviously, our conference champion has been shut out of the College Football Playoffs,” Fitzgerald said. “Until we get to a point where we put strength of schedule, and then obviously the value back on being a conference champion, as the two components that are the most important, I think we’re going to continue to have that.”

The past two seasons have seen the Big Ten beat up on one another and ultimately miss out on the playoffs. In both the 2017 and 2018 seasons, Ohio State has been throttled in a road game by a midlevel conference opponent, ultimately costing the Buckeyes — and the conference — a spot in the playoffs.

Two seasons ago, it was the 55-24 beatdown in Kinnick at the hands of Iowa, which finished 8-5. Last year, as the then-No. 2 team in the country, the Buckeyes had no answers for Purdue, losing 49-20 in the Boilermaker’s backyard. Purdue finished the season 6-7.

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Both seasons, Ohio State won the Big Ten Championship game, and both seasons the playoffs shut it out.

The rebuff is even more noteworthy in the case of 2017, in which two SEC teams — Georgia and Alabama — made the playoffs over the conference champion Buckeyes. The playoffs committee not only left out a conference champion but a conference champion that had just beaten then-undefeated No. 3 Wisconsin.

“Clearly Alabama and Clemson have separated themselves, and they deserve everything that they’ve earned in the last couple years,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said. “But I’m not sure that the strength of schedule or the conference championship has been adequately rewarded, in my personal view.”

Teams throughout the conference are capable of breaking the playoff drought. Ohio State is always a candidate. Michigan has Shea Patterson returning at quarterback, and a long-awaited leap over a Buckeye program now without Urban Meyer roaming the sidelines is possible. The Big Ten West resembles Noah Fant being guarded by a linebacker: wide open.

Although the always-competitive conference still faces a grueling nine-game conference schedule for the upcoming season, a playoff team is still an expectation, an overdue one at that.