OSU has the talent to beat anyone in the country, but so does Texas A&M and look how their season went.
Unfortunately, TCU deserved to be there. The B1G is the most overhyped conference in the country. The Big XII is tougher. OSU played a bunch of cupcakes all year and when it was their turn to finally play someone of value, they completely crapped the bed. The Big XII isn’t a good conference talentwise in comparison to us, but unlike the other conferences, it has parity. They have a lot of mediocre teams, but they don’t have a bunch of teams that are so inferior talentwise that they can’t compete like the B1G did this year (Rutgers, Northwestern, Indiana, and Nebraska were so bad they couldn’t win the Mtn West or Sun Belt this year).
Was TCU one of the four best teams in the country? Not even close. Did they deserve to be there? Unfortunately yes they did. Scrapping the BCS system brought this on. You are going to have injuries as well as flukes like TCU/Michigan, but you can’t take too much out of a single game and people are giving OSU too much credit. The month layoff always produces weird results in the playoff and allowed UGA to get tuned back in for the TCU game.