The SEC and ABC recently began airing promos for the SEC Championship Game, serving as a timely reminder to the audience: Before the College Football Playoff, a league champion must be crowned.

Whether teams actually want to play in it remains an open question, especially after every conference champion last year — including the Georgia from the SEC — was one-and-done in the CFP. The team that won the whole thing, Ohio State, was sitting at home during championship weekend.

Still, it was just one year of data. Plus, the dynamics have changed this year, with conference champions no longer automatically securing the first four seeds. And based on the initial CFP rankings last week, both teams that make it to Atlanta could very well end up with byes. Maybe that makes getting there more attractive.

The most attractive reason, however, is that if you make the title game, that means you had a good season. It means you’re almost certainly going to the CFP, win or lose. It means you can play for the SEC championship, which still matters to at least some people.

So who’s going there? Here’s where it stands with three weeks left in the regular season.

Controlling their destiny

There are two teams left unbeaten in SEC play: Texas A&M and Alabama, both 6-0. They don’t face each other. If they win their remaining SEC games, they will face off in Atlanta. That’s it. Very simple.

Texas A&M’s remaining games: Home against South Carolina, at Texas.

Alabama’s remaining games: Oklahoma at home, at Auburn.

What if one (or both) loses?

Three one-loss teams are sitting in wait, and two more with a couple of losses that aren’t mathematically eliminated:

Georgia (6-1): Texas
Ole Miss (5-1): Florida, at Mississippi State
Texas (4-1): at Georgia, Arkansas, Texas A&M
Vanderbilt (4-2): Kentucky, at Tennessee
Oklahoma (3-2): at Alabama, Missouri, LSU

There’s still the chance of ties for second, or three-way ties for first, which means …

The tiebreakers

The SEC adopted tiebreakers for last season, the first without divisions, and for a while, it looked like it would need to go to a complicated fourth tiebreaker. (More on that in a second.) But it ended up being pretty easy: Texas was the lone 7-1 team, with Georgia and Tennessee the only 6-2 teams, and Georgia beat Tennessee. Head-to-head is the first tiebreaker.

The SEC could get lucky again. Georgia will have played three other contenders, and Texas and Texas A&M will play each other. If not, the second tiebreaker is record against common SEC opponents – as in the teams both have played. But in a 16-team league with eight-game schedules, there isn’t always much overlap, and last year the second tiebreaker wouldn’t have solved anything.

Nor would have the third tiebreaker, which is record against the highest team in the standings that both have played, then proceeding downward through the standings until you get to a team that one beat and the other lost to. Again, that would not have solved anything last year, and may not this year. An exception would be if Alabama and Ole Miss were tied; Alabama beat Georgia, and Ole Miss lost to Georgia, so the tiebreaker goes to Alabama. But there aren’t many of those.

The fourth tiebreaker is the cumulative conference winning percentage of the opponents of each tied team. Essentially, schedule strength. And while there are still games left, we can already see who this could benefit.

Schedule strength

The following is the SEC opponents’ records for the seven contenders. This counts future opponents — as in all eight teams they have or will play— but does not assume any future results.

Texas: 24-24
Oklahoma: 24-24
Georgia: 24-25
Alabama: 22-27
Vanderbilt: 21-28
Ole Miss: 17-32
Texas A&M: 13-34

There will be some change to that over the final three weeks, but not enough for Texas A&M or Ole Miss to pull even with the top four teams. It’s enough to start gaming out scenarios for the final three weeks.

Scenarios

The website BB.notnothing.net has a handy calculator for the SEC race — as well as some others — and allows users to work through scenarios based on future results.

Some upsets could scramble the picture. But let’s say Alabama and Ole Miss win out (and they figure to be favored in their remaining games). Then it comes down to the two big Texas games: next week at Georgia and the regular-season finale against Texas A&M.

• If Georgia beats Texas and then the Longhorns beat Texas A&M, there would be a three-way tie for second place between Georgia, Texas A&M and Ole Miss. While Georgia would have wins over the other two, Texas A&M and Ole Miss did not play. So it would go to schedule strength, and Georgia is still very likely to win that.

The result: Alabama vs. Georgia rematch in Atlanta.

• If Texas wins out, the result is a three-way tie for second, with Texas, Ole Miss and Texas A&M. Texas would seem to win the schedule strength tiebreaker, but it could get more complicated. The three teams have three common opponents: Florida, Mississippi State and Arkansas. While Ole Miss and Texas A&M won all three, Texas lost to Florida. That would eliminate Texas, and then it comes down to Ole Miss and Texas A&M, and it would go to schedule strength.

Those two are close right now. If they ended up tied, it would go to the SEC’s fifth tiebreaker, which is even more complicated: capped relative scoring margin, a formula devised by SportSource Analytics that the SEC adopted, but figured it would rarely use, if ever.

What is the formula? Well, let’s check back in if needed.

The bottom line

Texas A&M and Alabama have a chance to make this easy. If not, the most realistic scenario is Texas A&M losing at Texas, after Texas has lost at Georgia, which sets up a Georgia-Alabama rematch.

But Alabama’s final two conference games aren’t gimmes either. Even Ole Miss could run into trouble, particularly in the Egg Bowl.

We know two teams are in pole position, three more teams are close behind and two more are still barely alive.

And we know every SEC Championship Game since 2014 has included either Alabama or Georgia, and that streak figures to continue. But we don’t know it for sure. And it seems likely we won’t know the SEC title game teams until the week before it happens.