Regardless of tonight’s outcome, one thing seems for certain when the College Football Playoff field is finalized in early December: The SEC will have more than the paltry three teams that made the initial 12-team field last season.
You probably remember a lot of complaining from certain segments of the college football ecosystem, from bitter Alabama fans to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey to ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit during the broadcast of an actual Playoff game.
The SEC lobbied hard, and successfully, for the Playoff selection committee to adopt new metrics that, in the conference’s eyes, better account for the strength of its teams’ various schedules. But as it turns out, the conference may not have even needed that. As Seth Emerson argues, the best metric to go off of is still wins, and the SEC has shown out in that regard. So far this season, SEC teams have an 11-3 record against fellow power-conference teams.
Unlike last year, when Alabama suffered defeats against unranked Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, the second tier of the conference has not stockpiled bad losses. Ole Miss’ only loss so far is to Georgia, whose only loss is to Alabama, which is currently favored to win the SEC and thus wipe out its Week 1 loss to Florida State. If Texas were to play the 2024 Alabama role this year and be a 9-3 bubble team, two of those losses (Week 1 against Ohio State and then one of either Georgia or Texas) would be against teams likely already in the Playoff. That will matter when stacking the Longhorns’ resume up against a potential two-loss Texas Tech or BYU Big 12 runner-up.