Scramble for playoff spots heating up in the SEC
Published
It’s a new day and age in college football.
There’s conference realignment, a 12-team playoff, and a different feel to the regular season. Losses that used to spoil seasons have become mere setbacks, and could be used for motivation – at least in the case of Georgia and Ohio State, who lost tantalizing conference games to Alabama and Oregon within the past three weeks. And the Crimson Tide’s loss to unranked Vanderbilt that immediately followed a huge victory over Georgia? It’s something they can overcome – provided they win at Tennessee on Saturday, and do the same when they face LSU at Death Valley next month.
Sure, no single game is as impactful as it may have been prior to this year, but this season has something college football hasn’t had before – a higher volume of meaningful games, and a frantic pace that runs from August through November.
After that, things get really interesting.
FanDuel currently has 15 teams with better than two-to-one odds to make the playoff, and 19 teams with better than four-to-one odds – 18 of which hail from Power Four conferences.
The SEC is where things particularly heat up. Eight of the 15 teams with the best odds come from college football’s best conference, and the scramble for hierarchy – and more importantly, those 12 coveted playoff spots – is only just beginning.
There’s still six weeks of conference play between now and the end of the regular season, and this Saturday features two of the year’s biggest matchups across all conferences.
(7) Alabama at (11) Tennessee (3:30 pm ET / 12:30 pm PT – TSN2)
This has the feel of a play-in game for the playoff, with the seventh-ranked Crimson Tide and 11th-ranked Vols both having squandered the bulk of their room for error over the past two weeks.
Alabama was ranked first in the AP Poll after its wild 41-34 win over Georgia three weeks ago, but suffered one of the greatest upsets in SEC history – that Diego Pavia-fuelled, 40-35 loss to Vanderbilt in Week 6 – and followed it with an uneasy two-point win over South Carolina in Tuscaloosa last Saturday.
Jalen Milroe had asserted himself as the Heisman front runner after going off for 491 yards of total offence against Georgia, but has committed four turnovers over the past two games.
Tennessee started the season 4-0, behind a trio of offensive outbursts and a grind-it-out, 25-15 win in its SEC opener at Oklahoma. But the hangover from that win over the Sooners travelled with the Vols to Arkansas, where they were held scoreless in the first half of a 19-14 loss to the Razorbacks, and then back to Knoxville, where they again failed to score in the first two quarters of a 23-17 overtime win over Florida.
Tennessee’s defence has been amongst the best in the nation, allowing just 249.8 yards per game (second in the FBS) and 10.7 points (fourth). Defensive end James Pearce – a projected first round pick in next April’s NFL Draft – should do his part to disrupt Milroe, but the Vols’ secondary will have its hands full with Alabama’s 17-year-old phenom, Ryan Williams.
(5) Georgia at (1) Texas (7:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm PT – TSN2)
The SEC’s greatest power from the past three years faces its current best team. Georgia, which already has that loss to Alabama on its record, pays a visit to Austin to face top-ranked, undefeated Texas.
Kirby Smart’s team can afford losses to the Crimson Tide and Longhorns and still make the playoff, but that wouldn’t leave much in terms of wiggle room with games at Ole Miss and against Tennessee next month.
The fifth-ranked Bulldogs have the most challenging schedule in the SEC for teams not named Florida, and haven’t exactly looked the part of the team that won back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022 since the beginning of last season. Carson Beck has dipped below Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders and Miami’s Cam Ward on most mocks of next year’s NFL Draft, after struggling in a too-close-for-comfort win over Kentucky and getting outplayed by Milroe a week later in Tuscaloosa.
Texas is 5-0, and fresh off a 34-3 win over Oklahoma in the Red River Rivalry, which debuted as an SEC matchup after both programs shifted from the Big 12 after last season.
Quinn Ewers quietly paced the Longhorns with 199 yards and a touchdown pass in his return from an oblique injury, but will have his hands full against Georgia, which features one of the nation’s top game wreckers in Mykel Williams, as well as NFL-ready Malaki Starks in the secondary.
A win over the Bulldogs, and Texas won’t have much left to prove. A loss, and Georgia reclaims its title as the team to beat in the SEC.