CHICAGO — It will always be a what-if. What if the college football playoff had been in effect last year? How would MSU have fared?

Mark Dantonio doesn’t only believe the Spartans would have been there (No. 4 in BCS before Rose Bowl), but also that they would have won it all, based on how they were playing at the end of the season.

“Do I ever think about that? Yeah, I’ve thought about that,” Dantonio said at Big Ten Media Days. “I thought we’d have been national champions, to be perfectly honest with you. I think we would have had a shot to do that. Coming out of the end of the season, we were playing great football. We were believing in ourselves.

“Were we there at the beginning of the season? No, but we played our best football in November into the championship game and Rose Bowl. We were like this (going up). That wasn’t necessarily the case for some other teams.”