Rose Bowl 2016: Known Info Before Final Playoff Rankings Reveal

This year’s Rose Bowl isn’t among the College Football Playoff, but it could feature a matchup between teams that narrowly missed the Final Four.

Now that the CFP picture is fully clear—Clemson, Alabama, Michigan State and Oklahoma are all but sure bets to be the Final Four following conference championship weekend—the Rose Bowl matchup also comes into better focus. 

No. 7 Stanford will assuredly be the Pac-12 representative after claiming the conference championship with a 41-22 win over No. 20 USC in the title game Saturday. 

But the Cardinal's opponent remains tricky to decipher. 

Rose Bowl chairman Scott Jenkins offered clarity, albeit only slightly, on the criteria with which the committee will make its selection, per Heather Dinich of ESPN.com.

"The strong presumption is that we're going to go with the highest-ranked team that's available to us," Jenkins said. "Only in extraordinary situations will we deviate from that presumption."

That will be either Ohio State or Iowa, which were ranked fourth and sixth, respectively, in the most recent CFP and Associated Press Top 25 polls. 

The question now looms over which of the two the committee will choose. Both teams have just one loss. Both defeats were by three points. And both losses came at the hands of Big Ten champion Michigan State. 

Ohio State seemed positioned to make its 15th Rose Bowl appearance and first since 2009, but Iowa is coming off a respectable loss in the final seconds in the Big Ten Championship Game in what was a proverbial play-in to the playoff.

Stewart Mandel of Fox Sports and Mark Schlabach of ESPN offered conflicting views on which team the committee would select:

David Harns of iSportsWeb encompassed how complicated it could become:

After Saturday’s Big Ten title game, many—including Rich Eisen of the NFL Network, Chad Leistikow of the Des Moines Register and Mike Hlas of the Cedar Rapids Gazette—believe the Hawkeyes have a solid argument:

While not in line with Ohio State's initial goals, a Rose Bowl victory wouldn’t be a bad consolation for a team that seemed at a dysfunctional crossroads following its lone loss to Michigan State in Week 11—after which Cardale Jones and Ezekiel Elliott brashly declared they were leaving at season’s end.

It would also be the first Rose Bowl appearance for three-time national champion head coach Urban Meyer, as Kirk Herbstreit of EPSN indicated:

Iowa hasn’t played in the Granddaddy of Them All since 1990 and hasn’t won the game since 1958. The Hawkeyes would be a nice selection given they haven't had the national spotlight all year despite going undefeated in the regular season.

Jenkins said both schools have been lobbying their case, per Doug Lesmerises of the Plain Dealer.

"There was a little bit of lobbying going on by both of them," Jenkins said. "Telling me Urban Meyer has never been in the Rose Bowl and by gosh, he really wants to be in that game."

Regardless of which Big Ten school is selected, the matchup versus Stanford will feature a game that merely a few weeks ago might have been predicted to be among the CFP.