College football winners and losers: After Week 11, the race for the SEC title is really, really muddy

Who is the best team in the SEC?

You can make a credible case for a handful of teams after Week 11. No. 16 Ole Miss beat No. 3 Georgia 28-10 in Oxford hours before No. 11 Alabama went on the road and easily dispatched No. 15 LSU 42-13.

You surely remember that Georgia beat Texas on the road earlier this season. Alabama beat Georgia. And Ole Miss now has a win over Georgia but has losses to Kentucky and LSU.

The top of the SEC is a mess. The race for the conference title could get really, really tricky. And that will affect the College Football Playoff too. Four SEC teams were in the projected playoff bracket in Tuesday’s inaugural rankings reveal.

After this weekend, there is a plausible scenario where either Texas or Texas A&M finishes the regular season at 7-1 in the conference and there are up to seven teams tied for second place at 6-2.

As you can imagine, there’s no real way to solve a six or seven-way tie. Especially in a conference that doesn’t have divisions and that’s too big enough for every team to play each other. The 16-team SEC could be showing us this season what tiebreaker life will look like in our college football era of mega conferences.

In case you were wondering, the SEC’s tiebreaker rules run six tiers deep. The first tiebreaker is head-to-head record and the second is the tied teams’ record against common opponents. That second tiebreaker will probably be enough to break a tie. But in case it isn’t, the record against the best common conference opponent or opponents is the third tiebreaker.

So how could this scenario work? Let’s lay it out for you.

LSU (6-3 overall, 3-2 SEC)

The Tigers need to win all three of these games will be favored in all of them. It’s very plausible they could win out. Florida was dominated by Texas on Saturday and dropped to 4-5 on the season. Vanderbilt lost…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-10 04:48:21

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