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Ohio State never stood a chance in the Fiesta Bowl against Clemson, taking a 31-0 loss that sent the Tigers to the national championship against Alabama.

That only naturally leads to the following question: Would Penn State have fared any better? Is there a legitimate gripe? Because Ohio State certainly didn't look the part of a top-four team.

We know for a fact Nittany Lions coach James Franklin, who will lead his team against USC in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 2, isn't thinking about it ...

... but it's a talking point all the same. After all, Penn State was team No. 5 in the final regular-season College Football Playoff Rankings. It was the odd team out, excluded in favor of Washington, which was no match vs. Alabama. Even more importantly, it got beat out by Ohio State even though Penn State beat the Buckeyes head to head and won the Big Ten championship. (The Buckeyes didn't win their division or conference title.)

"We're all competitors. If there is a place in the pecking order that competitively you can be that's where you want to be and so certainly we believed that we College Football Playoff worthy and that we deserved one of those four places," Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour said via ESPN. "The committee decided otherwise and we get to come to the Rose Bowl and play a really, really good USC team in the hottest game in the country. Those two CFP games are going on today; there is no hotter ticket than our game on Monday."

In the three years of the playoff format, Penn State became the first Power Five conference champion to be left out in favor of a non-divisional champ. If the roles had been reversed -- if Ohio State had been a two-loss Big Ten champion with Penn State's resume -- would the Buckeyes have been left out?

You can answer that on your own, but it's funny how suddenly conference championships, considered so valuable in the first two years of the playoff's existence, became just as devalued when a team not expected to win the most top-heavy division in college football did just that.

But if Penn State had hypothetically made the playoff, the results may not have been all that different. Games are about matchups, after all, and Penn State may have had a bad one either way. It stands to reason the Nittany Lions, had they made the final four, would have encountered the same issues if they had played either Alabama or Clemson. Namely, the offensive lines for Ohio State and Washington struggled to block superior defensive lines on Saturday.

And if there was one glaring weakness for the Nittany Lions during the season, it was pass protection. It might still be an issue when they face USC -- which, as you'll recall, did a number on Washington's O-line earlier this year.

Playoff inclusion can be tricky. If the goal is to find the four best teams, there's still an argument, resumes be damned, that no team outside of Alabama was playing better at year's end than the Trojans. Of course, we know in a four-team playoff format, a 3-loss team that didn't win so much as the Pac-12 South wouldn't get in.

But what has made the Rose Bowl an intriguing matchup is that it places two red-hot teams against one another. Penn State fits that description, as does USC. The Nittany Lions didn't win the Big Ten on some kind of fluke. They won because they played their best football at the right time and beat the right team head-to-head. Penn State was the "best" team.

So with Ohio State losing, badly, the point remains that Penn State's nine-game winning streak beginning in October may have been overlooked by the selection committee. There was no easy answer -- Penn State getting blasted by Michigan counts the same as its win over Ohio State -- but it's clear the Nittany Lions were given second-fiddle treatment in favor of #brands with strength of schedule being the out reason.

Because the dirty little secret about the Buckeyes is they were wildly inconsistent throughout the season. The road win at Oklahoma was great, but surviving against Northwestern and Michigan State was not.

There's no doubt now the selection committee got it right with Alabama and Clemson. This national title rematch undeniably puts the two best teams in a winner-take-all battle for the ages. There's a separate discussion as to whether the playoff has truly enhanced the national title race. By and large, the games have been lopsided.

But if the committee were to examine this year's decision post-semifinals, would it look at the Penn State-Ohio State with a different set of eyes?

Put another way: If presented with a similar scenario in 2017, would it make the same decision?

Penn State had a good argument to be in the playoff. That stands on its own merit regardless of how it does against USC, or how it would have done if put in the Fiesta Bowl. The outcome of the latter will never be known, however. Until the playoff inevitably expands to eight teams, it probably won't be the last question of its kind, either.