There are three Saturdays left in the regular college football season, meaning the SEC Championship Game is less than a month away — the first in more than 30 years to be determined without divisions.
As part of this season’s conference realignment, the SEC has done away with the East and West divisions that have divided the conference since the early 1990s. The winner of the East Division has since played the winner of the West Division in the conference championship.
With no divisions and new teams in the conference, the potential for chaos is greater than ever, meaning there are many potential tiebreaker scenarios that would determine which teams advance to the SEC Championship game. And remember, the winner of that game automatically earns a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Read on to learn more about the SEC title and tiebreaker scenarios.
When is the SEC Championship Game?
The SEC Championship Game will take place on Saturday, December 7, 2024. It will be held at 4:00 PM Eastern at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Who will play in the SEC Championship Game?
Without divisions, the top two teams in the SEC standings will reach the conference title game. The conference rankings are determined solely by the results during the conference. Complete season records are not relevant. Thus, a team with multiple losses outside the conference can still top the table within the conference.
Who are the favorites to make it to the SEC Championship Game?
From week 12, there are three teams in the SEC with only one loss in conference; every other team has at least two. Texas, Tennessee and Texas A&M are tied for the top of the SEC standings with three games remaining.
Texas and Texas A&M face off in the final week of the regular season – if they both have just one conference loss left at that point, the winner of the game will make it to the title game. (There’s even a scenario where they could both go to the title game regardless of who wins.)
Tennessee’s remaining opponents are Georgia, UTEP and Vanderbilt. If the Volunteers win, they’ll make it to the SEC title game.
That’s the biggest if in the SEC right now, as Tennessee has to travel to Athens to play the Dawgs on the road in the evening and, depending on which book you use, Georgia is about a 10-point favorite.
If the Volunteers lose to Georgia this week, they will join the five other teams in the SEC with two conference losses, setting off a potentially chaotic series of events to determine at the end of the season who are the best teams in the conference will be.
What are the SEC tiebreaker procedures?
In the event that two of the three one-loss teams don’t win (Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M), the SEC will almost certainly have to use tiebreakers to determine which teams make it to Atlanta.
The SEC says: “In the event of a tie between teams competing for a seat in the Conference Championship game, the following procedures will be used in descending order until the tie is broken:
A. Head-to-head competition between the tied teams
B. Record against all regular Conference opponents among tied teams
C. Record against the highest (best) ranked common Conference opponent in the Conference standings, and progress through the Conference standings among the tied teams
D. Cumulative Conference winning percentage of all Conference opponents among tied teams
E. Capped relative aggregate scoring margin over all Conference opponents among tied teams
F. Random draw of teams with an equal result”
Easy enough, but the real complication comes when you apply these procedures to a tie involving three or more teams.
What are the possible SEC Championship scenarios?
The simplest
The simplest scenario is the one above: Tennessee wins, and Texas or Texas A&M does the same. In that case, the winner of Texas-Texas A&M would play Tennessee in Atlanta at the end of the season.
The craziest
But if Tennessee loses to Georgia this weekend, or if one of the other teams pulls off an unexpected upset, there could be as many as the other teams. eight teams with two losses in the conference, all tied at the top of the conference. Consider that Tennessee could suffer its second loss to Georgia; Texas could suffer its second loss in an upset in Arkansas; and Texas A&M could take a second loss to Texas. How do you apply tiebreaker procedures to eight teams?
In this scenario, which would include Texas, Texas A&M, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, LSU and Mizzou, the likely decisive tiebreaker is the fourth on the list: the cumulative conference winning percentage of all conference opponents ( simply put: strength of the scheme). The eight teams do not all play directly against each other and they do not even have one common opponent.
In the strength-of-schedule tiebreaker, watch out for teams that played winless Mississippi State, as your opponents’ winning percentage will drop quickly. And that would lead to a conference championship between Alabama and LSU, the only teams in the hypothetical eight-way tie without Mississippi State on their schedule.
The likely one
If you subscribe to the wisdom of oddsmakers, expect Tennessee to lose to Georgia this weekend and Mizzou to lose to South Carolina this weekend, and expect everything else to remain status quo for the rest of the regular season.
The scenario this will likely lead to is one team with one loss at the top of the SEC table: the winner of Texas at Texas A&M on November 30. The winner of that game would thus earn their ticket to the title game, and there would be six other teams (loser of that game plus Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Ole Miss, LSU) with two losses in the conference, all tied for the second place.
Again, these teams don’t all play each other (regardless of which Texas school is part of the scenario), and they don’t all have a common opponent. So in a comparison of conference opponents’ winning percentages, teams once again have Mississippi State’s problem. Georgia would be eliminated almost immediately by this tiebreaker, as it was playing not only Mississippi State, but also one-win teams Kentucky and Auburn. Ole Miss and Tennessee suffer the same fate when they each play Oklahoma, Kentucky and Mississippi State. So that leaves us to compare a Texas team against LSU and Alabama.
Once we’ve eliminated Georgia, Ole Miss, and Tennessee, here are the remaining scenarios, assuming no major upsets (but there is one consequence we’ll keep in mind here: Arkansas at Missouri in the final week of the season) :
-
Texas beats Texas A&M, Arkansas beats Mizzou: Texas and Texas A&M advance to the SEC Championship game
-
Texas beats Texas A&M, Mizzou beats Arkansas: Texas and Alabama advance to the SEC Championship game
-
Texas A&M beats Texas, Arkansas beats Mizzou: Texas A&M and LSU advance to the SEC Championship game
-
Texas A&M beats Texas, Mizzou beats Arkansas: Texas A&M and Alabama advance to the SEC Championship game
When will we know who is going to the SEC Championship game?
Barring any super surprising upsets outside of what’s outlined here, we won’t know who goes to the SEC title game until the final SEC game is played on November 30th.
